1. Essays on Environmental Policies in China
- Author
-
Song, Yuqi
- Abstract
As the world's largest developing economy with growing concerns about how to counter environmental and climate shocks while maintaining its economic growth, China has developed various environmental policy tools throughout the past few decades. My dissertation includes three chapters of research that study the socio-economic impacts of two important Chinese environmental policies, the public good of quality weather forecasts, which aims to help people's adaptation to extreme weathers happening in the near future, and the long-run road rationing policy applied in nine major Chinese cities, which aims to limit emissions from vehicles on road and lower city level pollutions. Overall, my research identifies the differential policy impacts of these different policy tools of China in tackling environmental problems. The first two chapters are research under the greater project of "The Value of Weather Forecasts". For this project, I construct a novel dataset of 24-hour city-level weather forecasts in China, using Google speech-to-text API to transcribe videos of the national weather forecast TV programs to collect the actual information broadcast and received by the general public. From these research, I find that there exist significant behavior responses to the accuracy of weather forecast information in China. In Chapter 1, I show that accurate instead of inaccurate daily temperature forecasts of uncomfortable temperatures (extreme hot and medium-cold) lead to significant decreases in labor working hours per day. This shows that accurate weather forecast information helps in laborer's decisions to work less under weather shocks, in order to avoid potential health risks. Correspondingly, improved accuracy of weather forecasts contributes significant social values. The welfare analysis of this chapter estimates a marginal value of weather forecast accuracy as 930 2015 Yuan (148 2015 USD) per worker per year. Social benefits of accurate weather forecasts are also represented in Chapter 2, which demonstrates that when realized temperatures are extremely low, the negatively impacted average social sentiment (summarized with natural language processing analysis of city-level daily social media posts in 2014) is significantly improved, if accurate instantaneous temperature forecasts are provided. The third chapter analyzes the impacts of a well-known environmental policy in China, the end-number license plate policy, of a long-run, less strict version imposed over a set of 9 big cities of China restricting one-fifth of private vehicles per day on weekdays. This version of the road rationing policy is shown to have limited impacts in effectively reducing city-level air pollutions over the timeline of a decade, contrary to previous literatures showing that the short-run, strict version of this policy can significantly improve air qualities. The ambiguity of the policy effects implies people's behavior changes in response to the long-run road rationing policy, and provides useful implications on motivating instead of requiring people to change their daily activities for the society goal of cutting air pollutant emissions with different policy tools.
- Published
- 2023