Abstract
With sustained economic development, China’s ecological environment is becoming increasingly fragile and the problem of haze pollution is becoming increasingly prominent, which has affected the normal life of human beings and the stable development of society. In this paper, 287 cities’ panel data from 1998 to 2016 are used, PM2.5 is used to represent haze pollution, and the spatial Durbin model is used to explore the role of the economy and population agglomeration on smog pollution. The empirical results show that (1) haze pollution has obvious spatial spillover. From the perspective of China as a whole, the relationship between the economy and smog pollution is an inverted U shape. (2) China is divided into three economic regions, i.e., the east, the middle, and the west. In the east and middle regions, it is found that economic development also shows an inverted U-shaped relationship with haze pollution. (3) Regardless of the country or the three major economic regions, population agglomeration is the primary factor that aggravates haze pollution; the progress of technology and the optimization of the industrial structure can improve haze pollution. (4) Through further analysis of the indirect effects of haze in China, it is found that there is a significant spatial spillover effect. According to the results of this research, policy suggestions are put forward.
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Data availability
The datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are not publicly available due to relative requirements of financially supporting projects but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Notes
The first law of geography: everything is related, the closer things are, the more closely they are related.
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This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China (Grant No. 18BGL275).
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TG: data curation, formal analysis, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing.
HCY: data curation, formal analysis.
WL: project administration, funding acquisition, conceptualization, supervision.
XCL: conceptualization.
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Gan, T., Yang, H., Liang, W. et al. Do economic development and population agglomeration inevitably aggravate haze pollution in China? New evidence from spatial econometric analysis. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 5063–5079 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-10847-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-10847-4