Research On Resource Curse And Environmental Impact Of Coal Mining From The Perspective Of Pollution And Emission Reduction ——Based On County-Level Data In Shanxi Province

China's"rich coal,poor oil,and low gas"resource endowments have determined coal to be the backbone for the stable development of the economy and society.However,due to the excessive reliance on coal,coal resource-dependent areas have formed a"coal only"industrial development pattern.This has resulted a concentration of pollution and emissions while inhibiting the high-quality growth of the local economy.In order to achieve high-quality development as well as ecological protection in resource-dependent areas under the goal of"Carbon peak"and"Carbon neutral",it is necessary to change the extensive economic growth model that has been in place for decades.Therefore,it is of great theoretical and practical value to examine the resource curse and environmental impact of coal mining from the perspective of"synergistic reduction in CO₂ emissions and air pollutants".The unique coal resource endowment advantage brought a"golden decade"of economic growth for Shanxi province in the early 21st century.However,the short-lived prosperity also laid other problems,such as single industrial structure and extensive poor economic growth.During the"13th Five-Year"period,the average economic growth rate of Shanxi Province has slowed down to 5.4%,and the realistic issues such as human capital loss and environmental pollution have become more and more apparent,posing great challenges for Shanxi Province to achieve an all-dimensions high-quality development.In order to promote the transformation of resource-dependent areas,this paper presents a combination of theoretical and empirical analyses on the resource curse effect and related environmental impacts of coal mining.Considering the high differences in resource endowments among counties in Shanxi Province,advancing the research scale to a more subtle dimension can overcome previous studies'shortcomings of not taking county heterogeneity into account.Therefore,this paper uses panel data of counties in Shanxi Province and examines the nonlinear relationship and transmission mechanism between coal dependence and economic growth using fixed effects and RD models,as well as the examining the difference of resource curse in different counties through heterogeneity analysis.Second,a spatial Durbin model was used to examine the effects of coal mining on air quality in local and adjacent counties.Finally,the carbon emissions from coal mining were accounted for.The main results are as follows:1.The empirical results show a nonlinear inverted U-shaped relationship between coal dependence and economic growth,which verifies the existence of the resource curse;Robustness tests such as regression discontinuity design ensure the validity of the basic findings.2.Resource curse is more visible in counties with high coal production,where human capital loss,widening urban-rural income gaps,and environmental pollution cause the problem.3.Over-mining of coal also leads to deterioration of local air quality and has a significant spatial spillover effect.4.42%of counties emit more than 1 million tons of greenhouse gas from coal mining activities,with methane contributing 82%of total emissions.Based on these findings,this paper provides policy recommendations from the perspectives of resource conversion,policy regulation,and environmental governance.The innovations of this paper are as follows:1.Compared to previous studies which focus on the national or provincial level,this paper incorporates economic growth and environmental impacts into a unified framework to measure the resource curse and environmental impacts of coal mining from a more modest scale based on county data.Since the differences in coal species and market price,economic and social development status and climatic conditions in each county were considered,our conclusions are more convincing.2.On the one hand,the spillover effect is considered when studying the environmental impact of coal mining.On the other hand,the heterogeneous impact of coal species and mining conditions is considered based on the microscopic data of coal mines,which enriches the policy implications of"synergistic reduction of emission and pollution".