Driving mechanism and decoupling effect of PM2.5 emissions: Empirical evidence from China’s industrial sector

Debin Fang and Bolin Yu

Energy Policy, 2021, vol. 149, issue C

Abstract: Haze pollution has been a serious environmental issue in China, however, little research has focused on the industrial sector which accounts for a large part of total PM2.5 emissions. This paper aims to disclose the driving mechanism and decoupling effect of industrial PM2.5 emissions. First, this study reveals the spatial-temporal drivers of industrial PM2.5 emissions in China spanning 2000–2014 through geographical detector and logarithmic mean Divisia index decomposition, respectively. Then, the decoupling causal chain of industrial economic growth and PM2.5 emissions is investigated by a refined Laspeyres index method. The empirical results illustrate that: (1) Population distribution is the dominating factor for the spatial heterogeneity of industrial PM2.5 emissions. Different influencing factors show significant synergistic effects. (2) Industrial development effect is the main reason for the increase of industrial PM2.5 emissions, while the reduction in industrial PM2.5 emissions is primarily due to energy intensity effect, followed by coal pollution intensity and energy mix effects. (3) During the study period, the PM2.5-economic growth decoupling undergoes two states, and shows the tendency towards strong decoupling. (4) The PM2.5-coal consumption effect and energy consumption-economic growth effect are important factors influencing the changes of PM2.5-economic growth decoupling indicator, while the impact of the coal consumption-energy consumption effect is quite small. This paper provides important implications for reducing industrial PM2.5 emissions.

Keywords: PM2.5 emissions; Industrial sector; Index decomposition analysis; Geographical detector; Decoupling causal chain (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142152030728X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:enepol:v:149:y:2021:i:c:s030142152030728x

DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2020.112017

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Policy is currently edited by N. France

More articles in Energy Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().