Assessments of Air Pollution Control Effectiveness Based on a Sharp Regression Discontinuity Design —Evidence From China’s Environmental Big Data

Ren Wang,Lizhi Zhang,Yu Xia,Jiaqi Huang,Tongli Nong,Xu Xu

doi:10.3389/fenvs.2021.724716

Abstract

The Assessment andAppraisal Method for Ecological Construction Targets (the Method) was promulgated in 2016, which provided a concrete instruction for China’s air pollution control and established an explicit standard for reducing air pollutant concentration. This study implements a sharp regression discontinuity (RD) design and makes an assessment on air quality control effectiveness of the Method based on the high-volume big data acquired from 173 cities in China. The results show that the Method has significantly improved air pollution control on the overall air quality index (AQI) and reducing concentrations of PM2.5, PM10, SO2, NO2, and CO across the country in the observation periods. However, no reduction effect was observed for O3. The robustness tests support the conclusion as well. Besides, the heterogeneity analysis illustrates that the policy had a significant short-term treatment effect in East, South, Central, North, Northwest, Southwest, and Northeast China. However, the Method’s effect is found to decline over time either nationwide or regionally according to the persistence analysis. Therefore, this article puts forward several suggestions regarding the formulation of long-term regulations for air pollution control, the transformation of the growth model for sustainable development, and optimization of the incentive system for improved pollution control and prevention.

Highlights

With China’s rapid economic growth and ever-accelerating increase in resource consumption, air pollution has become the primary problem threatening the country’s sustainable development
The air quality index (AQI) is defined according to the six pollutants and simplifies separately their concentration values into a conceptual index value (Individual Air Quality Index, IAQI), which is the maximum value of the conceptual index values (Zhang et al, 2019)
After selecting a certain bandwidth, if the outcome variable presents a sudden change at the cut point, the effectiveness of adopting regression discontinuity (RD) design is considered to be verified and vice versa

Summary

Introduction

With China’s rapid economic growth and ever-accelerating increase in resource consumption, air pollution has become the primary problem threatening the country’s sustainable development. In China, air pollution is estimated to cause 1.6 million deaths per year, accounting for roughly 17% of all deaths nationwide (Rohde and Muller, 2015). Air pollution is identified as a cause of mental illnesses for which the associated health expenditures are USD 22.9 billion annually in total. Assessments of Air Pollution Control (Chen S. et al, 2018). With increasing severity requiring government response, China has implemented a series of environmental protection policies and regulations to tackle air pollution

Methods

Results

Conclusion