Abstract
China has become one of the countries with the most severe smog pollution, especially in winter. Many local governments had to take various measures to combat the smog. The driving restriction is one of the policies being widely implemented throughout the country, but the actual effect has been controversial. Over 30 cities in China adopted the driving restriction policy in winter specifically in recent years. In this study, regression discontinuity (RD) method is applied to 16 cities to study whether the policy was effective or not and to find out the reason behind. It is found that (1) the effect has shown differences in different cities, in Cangzhou, Linfen and Shijiazhuang, the policy was effective on winter smog control, while it was ineffective in Luoyang, Tangshan, Xinyang and Zhoukou. (2) High proportion of secondary industry in GDP and inconvenient public transport system has inhibitory effect on the effectiveness of the driving policy. (3) Population density, GDP, the proportion of urban green area and driving restriction intensity have no significant impact on the effectiveness of the driving restriction policy. (4) In terms of meteorological factors, average temperature, rainfall, wind speed and air pressure have a negative impact on PM2.5, while humidity has a positive impact on PM2.5.
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Data availability
The (daily average temperature, daily average wind speed, total daily rainfall, daily average air pressure and daily average humidity) data that support the findings of this study are available from Weather for 243 countries of the world and https://rp5.ru/Weather_in_the_world. The (daily average PM2.5 concentration) data that support the findings of this study are available from weather hind-casting and http://www.tianqihoubao.com/aqi/.
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Funding
This paper is supported by Program of the Humanities and social sciences of the Ministry of Education of China “Research on the synergistic effect of carbon market mechanism design on carbon emission reduction and smog control” (grant number 20YJA790082); the key program of the National Social Science Foundation of China “Research on the maturity of China’s carbon market and environmental regulation policy” (grant number 14AZD051); National Natural Science Foundation of China “Modelling Carbon Price Drivers with Optimized Smart Methods” (grant number 71101133); and Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University “Carbon finance innovation Research on the price formation mechanism of international carbon market” (grant number NCET-11-0725).
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Lan Yi: Conceptualization, supervision, writing-review and editing, project administration, resources and funding acquisition
Zhi-rong Kang: Methodology, software, data curation, writing-original draft and formal analysis
Li Yang: Methodology, software, formal analysis and validation
Mohammad Musa: Writing-review and editing and visualization
Fei Wang: Writing-review and editing
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Yi, L., Kang, Zr., Yang, L. et al. Do driving restriction policies effectively alleviate smog pollution in China?. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 11405–11417 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-16477-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-16477-8