Convergence on the haze pollution: City-level evidence from China

Özet

The convergence of haze is an important economic characteristic for curbing the haze pollution. This studyprovides thefirst empirical analysis to explore the convergence of haze pollution utilizing the panel data of 279prefecture-level cities in China from 2004 to 2016. Conventional studies neglected spatiotemporal dependenceof atmospheric pollution and the spatial effects of key determinants, which violated the economic logic ofconvergence at the theoretical level, and also lead to omission errors in estimation at the technical level. Toaddress the potential endogeneity problem, the Dynamic Spatial Durbin Models (DSDM) were employed toidentify the conditionalβconvergence on haze pollution. The empirical results verified the existence of hazeconvergence, suggesting that cities with high haze concentration would decrease more rapidly and should un-dertake more haze reduction tasks. Moreover, industrial structure upgrading, cleaner energy promotion, andtechnological innovation are the driving forces of haze reduction, and spatial industrial transfer and technologyspillover contribute to achieving haze convergence. The conclusions of this paper can provide enlightenment forthe allocation plan of haze pollution mitigation and the policy makers should take key socio-economic factorsand the spatial effects of these determinants into consideration in formulating haze reduction policies.