The Impacts of Low-Carbon City Pilot Projects on Carbon Emissions in China

Abstract

Here, we assessed the impact of low-carbon city pilot projects on carbon emissions across China through application of a series of econometric techniques to data on these three waves of low-carbon city construction. Our baseline results are obtained from a difference-in-differences estimator, comparing cities with and without introducing low-carbon city pilot projects, and show that low-carbon city pilot projects reduce carbon emissions by about 2 percentage points. We found a similar impact of low-carbon city pilot projects on carbon emissions when we controlled for the estimated propensity of a city to launch the low-carbon city pilot project based on a series of urban characteristics. We obtained comparable estimates when we instrumented whether a city would launch the low-carbon city pilot projects using regional waves of low-carbon city pilot projects. Our results also show that low-carbon city pilot projects have a larger impact on carbon emissions in northern, poorer, and less industrialized cities than those with the opposite characteristics. We found little evidence for the persistence of this impact on carbon emissions, implying that it is necessary to dynamically adjust the low-carbon city pilot projects for cities that have launched the project.