The impact of high-speed rail on SO2 emissions—based on spatial difference-in-differences analysis

Abstract

SO2 emissions have brought serious hidden danger to human health and environmental quality, thus hindering sustainable economic development. The development of high-speed rail indirectly has an important impact on SO2 emissions through its economic effects. Controlling SO2 emissions from the source has increasingly become the focus of many scholars, and it is very important to assess the environmental effects of high-speed rail on SO2 emissions reduction. We use the panel data of 285 cities in China from 2007 to 2017, and adopt the spatial Difference-in-Differences model to study the impact of the opening of high-speed rail on SO2 emissions. We also introduce an improved spatial DID model that distinguishes neighboring treatment groups and neighboring control groups to test the spatial spillover effect of high-speed rail on neighboring heterogeneous samples. We find that the opening of high-speed rail significantly reduces the city’s SO2 emissions through the internal accumulation effect of technological innovation and industrial structure optimization and the urban external interaction mechanism of the cross-regional flow of production factors. Moreover, the spatial spillover effect of the opening of high-speed rail on neighboring cities is significantly positive, especially the spatial spillover effect of HSR on SO2 emissions from neighboring cities without HSR. In addition, heterogeneity analysis shows that the effect varies with the different cities’ tiers and income levels. These findings are conducive to accurately assessing the environmental effects of high-speed rail, and provide important policy references for achieving sustainable development and reducing SO2 emissions.