Have driving restrictions reduced air pollution: evidence from prefecture-level cities of China
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Have driving restrictions reduced air pollution: evidence from prefecture-level cities of China Zhongfei Chen 1,2
&
Xiaoyu Zhang 1 & Fanglin Chen 1
Received: 13 March 2020 / Accepted: 27 August 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract With rapid economic development, air pollution became a serious problem in China. Vehicle’s exhaust emissions are among the main sources of air pollution. With samples of 173 prefecture-level cities in China from 2006 to 2016, this paper takes the implementation of driving restrictions as a quasi-natural experiment to examine the relationship between driving restrictions and air quality through the difference-in-differences method based on the propensity score matching. Results indicate that driving restrictions have not improved the air quality in terms of average treatment effect as there is no clear evidence that people turn from private cars to busses or subways. Furthermore, heterogeneous effects of driving restrictions exist across different regions and cities of China. The implementation of driving restrictions has significantly positive impacts on air pollution in the Eastern and Central cities of China, while it has significantly negative effects in non-capital cities. This study implies that the development of local public transportation needs to be taken into account when formulating the policy of driving restrictions. Keywords Air pollution . Driving restrictions . Difference-in-differences . Propensity score matching
Introduction Vehicle’s exhaust emissions are among important sources of air pollution and lead to major environmental problem in urban areas (Zhang et al. 2017). Energy consumption is responsible for huge emissions (Meng et al. 2018; Chen et al. 2018). The Ecological Environment Bulletin, published by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment of the People’s Republic of China in 2017, showed that the proportion of cities in China with ambient air quality exceeding the standard Responsible editor: Eyup Dogan * Xiaoyu Zhang [email protected] Zhongfei Chen [email protected] Fanglin Chen [email protected] 1
School of Economics, Jinan University, No. 601 Huangpu West Road, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510632, People’s Republic of China
2
Institute of Resource, Environment and Sustainable Development Research, Jinan University, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510632, People’s Republic of China
accounts for 70.7% of the whole cities. Hence, air pollution from vehicles is a serious problem in China. Rapid motorization has caused a range of issues, including air pollution, rising oil price, traffic congestion, and increasing greenhouse gas emissions (Sun et al. 2014). Air quality also affects the quality of life (Darçın 2014). Driving restrictions are among the important measures to alleviate air pollution and traffic congestion. However, have the driving restrictions been effective to curb down the air pollution in China? Based on the samples of 173 prefecture-level cities in China, we used difference-indifferences (DID) method
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