Abstract
Policy makers around the world are turning to smart city projects in an effort to address the challenges of population growth, energy efficiency, and environmental sustainability. Previous studies have evaluated the effect of smart city projects on air quality. However, evidence on the impact of the projects on energy efficiency remains unclear. This study gathered prefecture-level city panel data in China, and used three strategies, namely a difference-in-differences estimator, a matching difference-in-differences estimator, and a counterfactual model using a machine learning algorithm, to assess the impact of smart city projects on energy efficiency. This study reported similar results across these strategies above. That is, after the introduction of a smart city project, energy efficiency had a remarkable and sizeable increase, ranging from 4 to 7 per cent. Moreover, this study shows that the effects of smart city projects increased over time. In addition, this study found that the effects varied according to the characteristics of the cities.
Highlights
According to some predictions issued by the World Bank, by the year of 2050 approximately 70 per cent of population across the globe will be living in urban areas [1].Urbanization brings with it increased human, business, and industrial activities, which contribute to economic growth, and result in a rising demand for energy, which places large pressure on local energy supply [2,3,4,5,6]
In order to quantify the impacts of smart city projects on energy efficiency, this study estimated the relative change in energy consumption per unit of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in cities participating in the project and relative to cities not participating
The coefficient of smart city projects indicates that after project implementation the improvement of energy efficiency was better for participating cities, suggesting that smart city projects had a positive effect on energy efficiency
Summary
According to some predictions issued by the World Bank, by the year of 2050 approximately 70 per cent of population across the globe will be living in urban areas [1] Urbanization brings with it increased human, business, and industrial activities, which contribute to economic growth, and result in a rising demand for energy, which places large pressure on local energy supply [2,3,4,5,6]. This paper plans to fill this gap in the academic market For this purpose, this study used prefecture-level city data from China to investigate the impact of smart city projects on energy efficiency
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