Convergence on the haze pollution: City-level evidence from China

Abstract

The convergence of haze is an important economic characteristic for curbing the haze pollution. This study provides the first empirical analysis to explore the convergence of haze pollution utilizing the panel data of 279 prefecture-level cities in China from 2004 to 2016. Conventional studies neglected spatiotemporal dependence of atmospheric pollution and the spatial effects of key determinants, which violated the economic logic of convergence at the theoretical level, and also lead to omission errors in estimation at the technical level. To address the potential endogeneity problem, the Dynamic Spatial Durbin Models (DSDM) were employed to identify the conditional β convergence on haze pollution. The empirical results verified the existence of haze convergence, suggesting that cities with high haze concentration would decrease more rapidly and should undertake more haze reduction tasks. Moreover, industrial structure upgrading, cleaner energy promotion, and technological innovation are the driving forces of haze reduction, and spatial industrial transfer and technology spillover contribute to achieving haze convergence. The conclusions of this paper can provide enlightenment for the allocation plan of haze pollution mitigation and the policy makers should take key socio-economic factors and the spatial effects of these determinants into consideration in formulating haze reduction policies.