Urban and industrial environmental pollution control in China: An analysis of capital input, efficiency and influencing factors

Abstract

With rapid urbanization and industrialization, environmental pollution caused by such activities has drawn much attention due to its adverse impacts on environmental quality and public health. Therefore, under the current background of China's ecological civilization construction, promoting the precise and scientific treatment of environmental pollution holds great significance. This paper proposes an improved perpetual inventory method to systematically measure the capital stock of urban and industrial pollution control. The efficiency of urban and industrial pollution control is measured by adopting the global data envelopment analysis (DEA) model. Then, the influencing factors of pollution control efficiency are empirically analyzed by using the spatial Tobit regression model. The results reveal that, first, the growth rate of the capital input scale of urban pollution control is greater than that of industrial pollution control, and the spatial distribution of capital input is unbalanced. Second, the efficiency of urban and industrial pollution control from 1991 to 2019 was generally low. The current efficiency values of urban and industrial pollution control are less than 0.2 and 0.5, respectively, indicating that urban and industrial pollution control are far from efficient. Third, the efficiency of urban and industrial pollution control is significantly positively related to the level of urbanization and industrialization, has a U-shaped relationship with the economic development level, and has heterogeneous effects on technology, energy intensity, government influence and foreign trade. On this basis, we provide constructive suggestions for optimizing the performance of pollution control.