Abstract
Urban agglomeration has become a unique form of cities during the rapid development of emerging economies. With the increasing attention on global energy and environmental efficiency, air quality evaluation and pollution control have become important standards to measure the health and orderly development of such agglomerations. Based on panel data of 60 cities in the three major urban agglomerations of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH), Yangtze River Delta (YRD), and Pearl River Delta (PRD), this study uses the Modified MetaFrontier Dynamic SBM model to evaluate their air quality over the 5-year period of 2013–2017. The results present that the development level of air pollution prevention and control in China’s three major urban agglomerations is relatively low, and YRD as the most developed area has the worst effect of air pollution prevention and control. The MetaFrontier and Group Frontier Efficiency analysis confirms the conclusion of the cluster analysis that a significant two-level differentiation exists in China’s three urban agglomerations. Moreover, China’s three major urban agglomerations are still in the stage of high energy consumption and high development. Lastly, we point out different recommendations for industrial structure and governance foci of the three major urban agglomerations. Dust prevention technology should be improved to reduce PM2.5 in BTH, desulfurization technology should be enhanced to cut industrial SO2 emissions in YRD, and better emission reduction targets and other targeted measures should be formulated in PRD.
Highlights
With the development of economic globalization and regional integration, the degree of agglomeration between cities has significantly improved, and urban agglomerations are emerging with one or more large cities or mega-cities as their core
Due to the different content needs of the respective studies, many researchers re-select and combine the relevant air quality indicators to obtain innovative indicators. Their techniques are different from this article, where we focus on the selection of traditional air quality indicators
Since this study considers undesirable output and regional differences of the three major urban agglomerations in the dynamic slack-based measure (SBM) model, we can modify Tone and Tsutsui’s (2010) dynamic SBM model to be the MetaFrontier Dynamic SBM model with undesirable output
Summary
With the development of economic globalization and regional integration, the degree of agglomeration between cities has significantly improved, and urban agglomerations are emerging with one or more large cities or mega-cities as their core. Gottmann (1957) believes that urban agglomeration as the core of a region has a great impact on the region’s political, economic, cultural, and other fields. Environmental pollution and air quality problems in urban agglomerations have become more and more serious, attracting broader scholarly research and attention, such as the famous Great Smog of London (Polivka, 2018), the Donora Smog (Jacobs et al, 2018), and the dead lakes caused by industrial acid rain in North America. The research results on air quality evaluation of urban agglomerations conform to the direction and focus of global environmental protection
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