Efficiency evaluation of government investment for air pollution control in city clusters: A case from the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei areas in China | Newswise
In the field of urban air pollution control, government investment is a key driver of air quality improvement (e.g., China’s Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan). However, existing research has two critical limitations: First, most studies use provincial-level data, failing to capture city-level inefficiencies and provide targeted guidance; second, they ignore the impact of macro-environmental factors (e.g., economic development) and lack dynamic analysis of annual efficiency changes, leading to biased evaluations of investment efficiency. Additionally, regional disparities in investment allocation (e.g., between core and peripheral cities) further undermine the overall effectiveness of pollution control.
Therefore, a research team composed of scholars from Beijing Information Science and Technology University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences has carried out a research entitled “Efficiency Evaluation of Government Investment for Air Pollution Control in City Clusters: A Case from the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei Areas in China”.
This study employs a three-stage DEA-Malmquist model (eliminating environmental and random interference) to evaluate the static efficiency and dynamic annual changes of government air pollution control investment in 19 cities of the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei (BTH) region (2014–2018). Key findings include: 1) Static efficiency: The overall comprehensive technical efficiency (TE) is 0.901, with scale inefficiency (SE=0.913) as the main constraint—Beijing has the highest TE (0.994), while Hebei Province has the lowest (0.776). 2) Dynamic changes: Total factor productivity (TFPch) grows by 37.9% cumulatively, driven mainly by technological progress (TEch up 35.4%), while investment management efficiency (Effch) only increases by 1.9%. 3) Regional disparities: Inter-provincial efficiency differences (10%) are more significant than intra-provincial (6%); cities at inter-provincial junctions (e.g., Shijiazhuang, Tangshan) have low efficiency due to unreasonable investment allocation. Robustness tests confirm that expanding investment scale and enhancing inter-city collaboration can mitigate inefficiencies.
The paper “Efficiency evaluation of government investment for air pollution control in city clusters: A case from the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei areas in China” is authored by Siqi YANG, Li ZHANG, Zhaoxu CHEN, and Nan LI. Full text of the paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42524-023-0269-x.