China’s War on Pollution: Evidence from the First 5 Years 中国向污染宣战: 第一个五年的证据

CIDEG2020年设立重大研究课题《环境改善对人力资本积累的影响研究与对策分析》，近日课题组将阶段性成果发表在Review of Environmental Economics and Policy （REEP）上，题为China’s War on Pollution: Evidence from the First 5 Years。文章分析了中国自2014年“向污染宣战”以来取得的巨大的环境质量改善，并系统总结了近年来环境质量变化对经济、社会和人类健康的影响。REEP是美国环境与资源经济学家协会（AERE）和欧洲环境与资源经济学家协会（EAERE）的官方杂志，主要发表环境经济学领域重大问题的综述型文章，为环境经济政策的制定提供最新的学术思想。该文章的作者包括来自芝加哥大学的Michael Greenstone教授，来自康奈尔大学的李善军教授，来自俄勒冈大学的邹咏辰教授，以及CIDEG课题的研究负责人、来自香港大学的何国俊教授。“清华大学CIDEG”特将文章全文分享如下，以飨读者。

精彩内容摘要  

INTRODUCTION

China’s unprecedented economic growth, heavy reliance on fossil fuels, and lax environmental regulations have significantly degraded the country’s environmental quality during the past few decades (World Bank 2007). Indeed, by 2010, China had become the world’s largest consumer of energy and coal, largest automobile market, and largest emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2) and sulfur dioxide (SO2). Dubbed “airpocalypse” by the international news media,【1】severe air pollution episodes in large urban centers such as Beijing in the early 2010s resulted in a public outcry over the lack of basic, public information about pollution and the absence of effective government responses (Barwick et al. 2019).

Against this backdrop, China began to shift away from its long-standing strategy of prioritizing economic growth over environmental concerns. At the opening of the annual meeting of the People’s Congress in March 2014, Premier Li Keqiang declared a “war on pollution,” denouncing smog as “nature’s warning against inefficient and blind development.”【2】As a result, the central government undertook unprecedented regulatory changes on multiple fronts, including (1) recognizing fine particulate matter (PM2.5) as a primary pollutant and establishing national maximum standards for PM2.5 for the first time, (2) setting pollution reduction as one of the key bureaucratic targets in evaluating and promoting government officials, (3) launching a nationwide, real-time air quality monitoring and disclosure program, and (4) implementing a range of environmental policies, including piloting seven regional CO2 cap-and-trade programs and promoting the electrification of the passenger transportation system (Barwick et al. 2019; Greenstone et al. 2020).

China has made significant progress in improving air quality since 2014. As we will discuss in this article, local air pollution levels have fallen significantly; 5 years after its peak in 2013, national-level PM2.5 levels declined by about 40 percent, and SO2 and CO concentrations fell by 65 and 33 percent, respectively. In comparison, the United States took at least a decade and two significant recessions to achieve comparable percentage reductions in air pollution following passage of the Clean Air Act in 1970.【3】Air pollution levels in China remain high despite the significant progress, suggesting that further efforts are needed to bring the country’s environmental quality in line with international recommendations. In 2018, for example, the national average PM2.5 concentrations was 40.1 mg/m3, which is still more than four times the level considered to be safe (10 mg/m3 for the annual mean) by the World Health Organization.

This article, which is part of a symposium on China and the Environment, reviews the emerging literature on the economic, social, and health consequences of China’s war on pollution. 【4】This literature has taken advantage of recent improvements in data availability and accuracy. We begin in the next section by describing recent trends in air and water quality in China. Then we review empirical evidence on the economic, social, and health impacts of pollution in China over the past decade and discuss compensatory responses. We conclude with a summary of our findings and a brief discussion of future research priorities. Together with the two other articles in this symposium—Karplus, Zhang, and Zhao (2021) and Auffhammer et al. (2021)5—we seek to provide readers with a one-stop shop for key economic insights into China’s environmental and energy challenges.

REFERENCE    

1 See, for example, https://www.npr.org/2013/01/14/169305324/beijings-air-quality-reaches-hazardous-levels;https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/dec/16/beijing-airpocalypse-city-almost-uninhabitable-pollution-china.

2 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-parliament-pollution/china-to-declare-war-on-pollution-premier-says-idUSBREA2405W20140305.

3 For data on pollution reduction trends in the United States under the Clean Air Act, see https://www.epa.gov/air-trends.

4 Vennemo et al. (2009) and Zheng and Kahn (2013) conducted earlier reviews of research on the causes and consequences of China’s environmental challenges, with the former focusing on the status and trends and the latter focusing on the role of urbanization and the regulatory environment.