Does asymmetric persistence in convergence of the air quality index (AQI) exist in China?
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Does asymmetric persistence in convergence of the air quality index (AQI) exist in China? Xue-Tao Zhang 1,2 & Xi-Hua Liu 2 & Chi-Wei Su 2 & Muhammad Umar 1 Received: 12 April 2020 / Accepted: 28 May 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract In recent years, China’s air pollution has caused significant concern in the academia. China is the hub of business and financial activities, with the most populous cities. It is important to determine the convergence and asymmetric persistence of air quality index (AQI hereafter) in China to achieve sustainable development goals, especially the ones related to the environment. This paper uses the Fourier quantile unit root test to check for inter-regional convergence of monthly AQI for 74 cities across China from January 2013 to July 2019. For a comparative baseline analysis, five conventional univariate and quantile unit root tests are also conducted. The empirical outcomes show that the Fourier quantile unit test exhibits a significant advantage in detecting smooth breaks and evaluating the asymmetric behavior and mean-reverting properties of AQI. Moreover, the monthly AQI in 70 out of 74 C0hinese cities are stationary processes. These findings not only focus on the appropriate use of relevant modeling techniques of smooth breaks and asymmetries in the AQI series of the 74 Chinese cities but also provide crucial environmental sustainability and economic implications for AQI regulation policies. Keywords Air quality index . Environmental sustainability . Flexible Fourier test . Fourier function . China
Introduction China has achieved high economic growth consistently since the last few decades due to opening up and restructuring of its economy; however, this high economic growth is achieved at the cost of environmental degradation (Gu et al. 2019). Responsible Editor: Nicholas Apergis Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-09498-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Xi-Hua Liu [email protected] Xue-Tao Zhang [email protected] Chi-Wei Su [email protected] Muhammad Umar [email protected] 1
School of Business, Qingdao University, Qingdao 266061, China
2
School of Economics, Qingdao University, Qingdao 266061, China
Similarly, with increasing pollution due to economic activities, the Chinese government is also taking several measures to control and promote pollution prevention policies. In this regard, during the last decade, China has introduced various innovative environmental protection initiatives to monitor air emissions caused by wide-scale industrialization projects (Yan et al. 2019). These initiatives include the new Air Pollution Prevention Action Plan issued in 2013 and the announcement of “Five-Year Action Plan to Win a Blue-Sky Defense.” Moreover, the Chinese economy has also shifted from high-quantity growth to high-quality development stage. Such growth is associated with improved methods for the industrializa
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