Abstract
This paper evaluates the impact of the second municipal solid waste (MSW) source separation program on municipal solid waste generation (MSWG) in China. Without considering the spatial interactions between cities, the second MSW source separation program has a nonsignificant adverse effect on the per capita municipal solid waste generation (PMSWG). Relaxing the stable-unit-treatment-value assumption (SUTVA), which holds in most of the previous estimation literature on treatment effects, involving the spatial spillover effect among cities, as well as correcting the endogenous local policy has a significantly negative but not robust impact on the PMSWG. The estimation results of the generalized nesting spatial regression models (GNS) imply that the spatial interaction characteristics among Chinese prefecture-level cities may, if neglected, lead to underestimation of the reduction effects of the second MSW source separation policy on the absolute amount of PMSWG. More importantly, our study indicates that although not all the spatial econometric models support the significant reduction effect of source separation on the absolute amount of PMSWG, the source separation program significantly reduces the relative amount of PMSWG, and this result is robust in all spatial models.
Highlights
The problem of municipal solid waste (MSW) caused by economic growth and urbanization is expected to be a major worldwide challenge in the future, especially for developing countries
Since the actual implementation of the program was in 2014, the probability of implementing the second MSW source separation program in each city was first estimated by using observable exogenous variables that were not affected by the policy before the implementation of the policy (2002–2013) and replacing the endogenous policy variables to test the program impact of the second MSW source separation
The analysis indicates that comparing with the results estimated from the models with stable-unit-treatment-value assumption (SUTVA), the spatial estimation increases the significance of the impact of the second MSW source separation program under the specification of the IDIS matrix
Summary
The problem of municipal solid waste (MSW) caused by economic growth and urbanization is expected to be a major worldwide challenge in the future, especially for developing countries. Due to the feasibility of various tax and subsidy policies in practice, the municipal authorities of developing countries have limited policy tools and mainly rely on traditional Command and Control Policies Those policies involve imposing restrictions on the recycling proportion of all packaging waste [2], using a certain percentage of recycled materials [8], and implementing MSW source separation programs. This paper proposes a spatial-two-stage least squares (S2SLS) framework for evaluating the program impact on the per capita municipal solid waste generation (PMSWG) by involving the spatial spillover effects among cities as well as correcting the endogenous local policy.
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