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ABSTRACT
Facing severe air pollution in its North Plain, the central government of China initiated the Joint Clean Air Action (JCAA) in 2017 to facilitate pollution mitigation efforts across the region. While quite a few studies investigated the effectiveness of this regulation, much less attention is paid to the pollution spillover effects. We empirically examine the effects, and show that 1) air quality in the east of the target cities has been improved due to positive spillover of improved air quality under the JCAA; 2) the beneficiary spillover lasts for two seasons and disappeared in autumn and winter; 3) air quality in the north, south and west directions are almost not changed; 4) wind direction and topography, two determinants of atmospheric transport, have a considerable influence over the spillover effects. Our study provides a fresh perspective to understand the impacts of the JCAA policy and underlines the necessity of taking both pollution and air quality spillover effects into the cost-benefit analysis.
Implications: Pollution regulations in one place may increase pollution in other places, as production and emissions are re-allocated under the incentives induced by regional-specific regulations. This phenomenon has long been recognized in the literature as pollution spillover. However, if the relevant production and emissions are not re-allocated, at least not re-allocated in large quantities, local air quality improvement induced by regulations may also benefit the neighboring areas. We call this effect air quality spillover. Both spillover effects should be rigorously evaluated, which is of scientific interest by itself and also contributes to a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of environmental regulations.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability statement
The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the following public domains: the Chinese Air Quality Online Monitoring and Analysis Platform at https://www.aqistudy.cn/, the NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center at https://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/noaa/isd-lite/ and the Resource and Environment Science and Data Center of Chinese Academy of Sciences at https://www.resdc.cn/.
Supplementary data
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10962247.2023.2255579.
Notes
2 The primary pollutant is defined as the air pollutant (SO2, NO2, PM10, PM2.5, CO, O3) that has the most significant contribution to the local Air Quality Index (AQI) in any given time range. More details about the index can be acquired from http://www.mee.gov.cn/ywgz/fgbz/bz/bzwb/jcffbz/201203/t20120302_224166.shtml.
4 The “Action Plan for Joint Comprehensive Control of Air Pollution in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and Its Surrounding Areas in Autumn and Winter of 2017–2018”, which was issued in August 2017.
5 For example, the detailed implementation rules of Shandong province can be found at http://www.shandong.gov.cn/art/2017/9/27/art_107851_87619.html.
6 We choose to evaluate SO2 emissions as SO2 is one of the key precursors of PM pollution. The data of industrial SO2 emissions are collected from China City Statistical Yearbooks (2014–2018).
7 The data is obtained from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, https://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/noaa/isd-lite/. We calculated the average spillover wind direction using the data at the level of meteorological observation stations in the related regional neighboring cities.
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Notes on contributors
Lin Xiang
Lin Xiang is a PhD Candidate at the School of Economics and Management, Beihang University. His research focuses environmental policy evaluation and low-carbon governance.
Ying Fan
Ying Fan is a Professor at the School of Economics and Management, Beihang University. Ying is an expert in energy economics, climate finance, and modeling of energy-environment-economy systems.
Xueying Yu
Xueying Yu is an Associate Professor at the School of Economics and Management, Beihang University. Most of her research is about environmental policy evaluation and design, as well as individuals’ environmental behaviors.