EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Pollution effects of place‐based policy: Evidence from China's development‐zone program

Yue Hua, Mark Partridge and Weizeng Sun

Journal of Regional Science, 2023, vol. 63, issue 3, 703-727

Abstract: Environmental externalities of place‐based policy have generally been overlooked despite their welfare consequences. This paper studies the air‐pollution effect of development zones in urban China using a geo‐coded data set of 2720 counties from 1998 to 2016. By adopting the generalized difference‐in‐difference framework to resolve the problem of endogenous locational selection for place‐based policies, we find that development zones reduce ambient PM2.5 concentration by around 1.8%, leading to a total social gain of $7.75 billion USD. The environmental benefit varies by the zone's dominant industry, geographical region, administrative affiliation and time of establishment. We further show that development zones are comparably cleaner due to the incentives of central and local governments, manifested by the desire to administratively promote development zones, the attempt to satisfy residential demands for higher quality‐of‐life cities, and the employment of the national environmental monitoring system.

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/jors.12637

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:bla:jregsc:v:63:y:2023:i:3:p:703-727

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0022-4146

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Regional Science is currently edited by Marlon G. Boarnet, Matthew Kahn and Mark D. Partridge

More articles in Journal of Regional Science from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:bla:jregsc:v:63:y:2023:i:3:p:703-727