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Carbon emissions performance trend across Chinese cities: evidence from efficiency and convergence evaluation

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Abstract

Improving carbon emissions performance in Chinese cities is a crucial way to promote China’s sustainable development. Employing the super-efficiency SBM model, we first estimate the carbon emissions efficiency (CEE) of 262 Chinese cities from 2003 to 2016. Then we study and explain the club convergence of CEE combining Markov and spatial Markov models and Moran’s I test method. The results show that CEE has improved, especially for the western and northeastern cities. The efficiency of the northwest cities is low, while those of the central and coastal cities are relatively high. Club convergence exists in China’s urban CEE. Cities with high- and low-level efficiency have much higher convergence levels. There are significant spatial agglomeration and spillover effects in China’s urban CEE, contributing to the club convergence. Our analysis suggests that “cross-border” cooperation and communication between cities in different clubs should be highly promoted. Cities in high-level efficiency clubs are encouraged to play its role in radiating the lower-level cities. And the Chinese government is encouraged to strengthen carbon emissions mitigation in low-level areas through combining the green “Belt and Road” construction with the establishment of a national carbon market.

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Notes

  1. 1Some cities are not included in the dataset due to data availability and abnormal value issue. In total, there are 293 prefecture-level cities in China in 2016.

  2. 2The classification criterion of this article is that the number of cities in each level is as even as possible. So the cities are divided into four categories according to the critical values that are 95, 100, and 105% of the average CEE of 262 cities in each year, namely, low, medium-low, medium-high, and high-level.

  3. 3If the change in carbon emissions efficiency in each city has completely equal probability, the value is 0.25. If the probability of maintaining the status is greater than changing it (i.e., transferring to any other status), the value is 0.5. Therefore, this article says that if the diagonal element is greater than 0.5, the club members of the level are more inclined to maintain the status and there is a convergence of the club.

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Funding

This research was supported by the Humanities and Social Science Fund of Ministry of Education of China (20YJCZH144, 20YJC790191), Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation (2019A1515010884), Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (2018A030310025, 2018A030310044), and Pearl River Talents Plan of Guangdong Province.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics and Trade, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, 510006, China

    Kai Tang & Yiting Wang

  2. School of Statistics, Tianjin University of Finance and Economics, Tianjin, 300222, China

    Chun Xiong

  3. School of Mathematics and Statistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, 510006, China

    Di Zhou

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  1. Kai Tang
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Correspondence to Di Zhou.

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Tang, K., Xiong, C., Wang, Y. et al. Carbon emissions performance trend across Chinese cities: evidence from efficiency and convergence evaluation. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 1533–1544 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-10518-4

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