Impact of China’s National Sword Policy on Waste Import Margins: A Difference-in-Differences Approach

Bowen Li and Yifei Mu ()
Additional contact information
Bowen Li: School of International Business, Zhejiang Yuexiu University, Shaoxing 312030, China
Yifei Mu: School of International Economics and Trade, Dongbei University of Finance and Economics, Dalian 116025, China
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Chin-Ho Lin

Sustainability, 2024, vol. 16, issue 2, 1-20

Abstract: As a major destination of waste products, China implemented the National Sword Policy (NSP) to regulate the high pollution of waste imports. The existing literature primarily focuses on the motivations behind China’s waste imports and the policy implications of the NSP on China’s waste imports and the global recycling market. This study innovatively focuses on the extensive, intensive, price, and quantity marginal effects of the NSP on China’s waste imports using a difference-in-differences (DID) approach with 26 categories of waste products for 150 countries and regions from 2007 to 2021. The findings indicate that: (1) The NSP has led to declines in the intensive and quantity margins of regulated waste imports, while the price margin has increased. (2) In the years following the implementation of the NSP, the impacts continued to intensify. (3) The NSP has reduced the motivation for exporters to export highly polluting waste to China in search of a “Pollution Haven”. (4) Orientations implementing policies that place the responsibility for products’ environmental impact and encourage waste sorting can effectively alleviate the inhibitory effects of the NSP. These results suggest that the Chinese government needs to strengthen the control of high-polluting and low-value product imports. Waste-exporting countries should encourage enterprises to take responsibility for the entire lifecycle of products and promote waste sorting and treatment facilities. Enterprises should strengthen the environmental impact assessment of the entire product lifecycle and consider materials that are easy to sort and recycle.

Keywords: waste imports; National Sword Policy; difference-in-differences (DID); quantity margin; price margin (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/16/2/776/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/16/2/776/ (text/html)

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:gam:jsusta:v:16:y:2024:i:2:p:776-:d:1320217

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().