Environmental Policy Evaluation Models And Their Applications

Precisely evaluating the effectiveness of environmental policies is the important guarantee for policymakers in creating plans to address environmental issues.The main contribution of this dissertation is to construct a comprehensive evaluation model framework for estimation on the environmental benefits,spatial spillover effects and policy synergy effects of environmental policies.The model framework in this dissertation is not only applicable to China,but also for designing and evaluating environmental policies in other highly polluted countries.The logic of this paper is to comprehensively evaluate the environmental benefits and cost-benefits of one typical environmental policy,in Chapters 2.As a typical policy of energy transition,clean heating reduces air pollution during both heating season and non-heating season.The environmental improvements bring health economic benefits of about 109.85 billion yuan,which exceed the total costs of governments and residents.Hence,the clean heating policy was identified as a net-positive benefit program with environmental and public health improvements.Moreover,the inequality in subsidies from different cities governments increases the heating burden on low-income households and leads to heating poverty for households in the less developed regions.Environmental regulation affects the environmental quality of not only local areas but also surrounding regions.In Chapter 3,this dissertation identifies the spatial spillover effects of environmental regulation from the spatial perspective of urban agglomerations.It remains unknown whether the effect of environmental regulations on the surrounding regions is free riding or pollution shelter.A spatial regression model is employed for estimation the spatial spillover effects of environmental regulation.Results show that cities with loose regulation become the pollution shelters.The spatial spillover effects offset the improvement effects of local environmental regulations on the air quality.Furthermore,the comparison amongst three urban agglomerations showed that the spatial spillover effects of PM_2.5 concentrations in BTH and YRD are higher than that of PRD.This is attributed to differences in industrial structure,population density,economic development,FDI and geographical location.Therefore,the spatial spillover effects should be taken into consideration and joint regulation should be strengthened to address air pollution issues in urban aggregations.In fact,it is not an individual policy implemented in a city,but multiple policies implemented simultaneously to control air pollution.However,it remains unclear which policies actually mitigate air pollution when multiple policies are adopted together.Therefore,Chapter 4 estimates the interaction effects among policies and identifies the optimal combinations of air-related policies.Results show that adoption of policy combinations with different types of measures can achieve greater and more effective air improvement results owing to the complementary effects among policies.The effects of policy combinations with the same types of measures are relatively weak due to substitution effects.A holistic policy package involving different policy measures,such as stringent emissions standards for the industry,energy transition strategies,market-based trading mechanisms and multi-level inspection,may be the optimal strategy for air quality improvement.