Abstract
The Chinese central government has adopted a nationwide administrative allocation policy to reduce carbon and sulfur emissions. Using the ZSG-DEA (Zero-Sum Gain Data Envelopment Analysis) approach, this paper evaluates and compares the emission efficiencies of China’s provincial CO2 and SO2, and provides a reallocation scheme. The results show that the administrative allocation leads to an increasing gap of provincial emissions-reduction ability; provinces with higher efficiencies have difficulty achieving their administrative targets, whereas provinces with lower efficiencies can more easily achieve their targets. Additionally, the administrative allocation scheme ignores the difference in efficiencies, whereas the ZSG allocation scheme of this paper emphasizes the Pareto optimality of economic, environmental, and energy factors while comprehensively considering fairness and efficiency.
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Notes
- 1.
“Beijing’s skyscrapers receded into a dense gray smog Thursday as the capital saw the season’s first wave of extremely dangerous pollution, with the concentration of toxic small particles registering more than two dozen times the level considered safe”, reported by Associated Press on January 16, 2014.
- 2.
In the Twelfth Five-Year Plan Work Program on the Integrated Energy Conservation and Emissions Reduction, the Chinese government stated that by 2015 the country’s total nitrogen oxide emission should be controlled within 20.462 million ton, downward at least 10% from the end of 2010.
- 3.
These two years are selected because that 2010 and 2015 are the final year of China’s Eleventh and Twelfth Five-Year Plan, respectively, so this paper can obtain relevant documents and reports. Some data of 2015 are simulated values.
- 4.
The population in 2015 are estimated based on the population of 2013 with using 0.72% as the annual growth rate, because the Twelfth Five-Year Plan Work Program on National Population Growth stipulated that “control the annual growth rate of population within 0.72%”.
- 5.
This paper uses Perpetual Inventory Method (PIM) to estimate the real capital stocks of various provinces in 2010 and 2015. When estimating the capital stocks in 2015, this paper uses the provincial capital stocks in 2013 as base, and assumes that the growth rate of Chinese material capital stock is 14%.
- 6.
The regional sulfur-emission control plan in the Annex 4 of China’s Twelfth-Five Plan Work Program on the Integrated Energy Conservation and Emissions Reduction provides the provincial target of sulfur-dioxide emission, this paper uses it directly as the estimated value of administrative allocation of 2015.
- 7.
In Tianjin, the industrial section accounts for an excessive proportion in economic structure (being 48% in 2010), and the heavy industry accounts for 84% in the industrial section in 2010.
- 8.
Shanghai, Guangdong, Beijing, Jiangsu, Tianjin, and Zhejiang need to lower emissions under the administrative allocation scheme but increase emissions under the ZSG scheme. On the contrary, Yunnan, Xinjiang, Gansu, Shaanxi, Jilin, Shanxi, Heilongjiang, Liaoning, Hebei, and Hubei need to increase emissions under the administrative allocation scheme but reduce emissions under the ZSG allocation scheme.
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Acknowledgments
Zhongqi Deng acknowledges financial support from the Social Science Foundation of China on “the study of the optimal city size in China under the triple effects of growth, environment and congestion”. Ruizhi Pang acknowledges the Humanities and Social Sciences Project of the Ministry of Education of China (no. 15YJA790049) and Collaborative Innovation Center for China Economy.
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Deng, Z., Pang, R., Fan, Y. (2018). Allocation Schemes and Efficiencies of China’s Carbon and Sulfur Emissions. In: Pang, R., Bai, X., Lovell, K. (eds) Energy, Environment and Transitional Green Growth in China. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7919-1_6
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