How Effective are Air Pollution Control Policies in China? Evidence from 35 Cities Nationwide

In September 2013, China began to implement a series of policies in tackling severe air pollution. This paper aims to explore the diversity and effectiveness of its air pollution control policies at the city level. A city-level pollution control policy indicator is constructed for 35 Chinese cities during the last two air pollution control action periods from 2014 to 2017 and 2018 to 2020. Additionally, this paper employs the panel vector autoregression model (PVAR) to estimate the impact of air pollution control policies on air pollution reduction. The empirical results show that, in terms of the two main air quality indicators, [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text], China’s air pollution control policies have helped improve the air quality over the last several years. The study concludes that air quality improvement should depend on coordinated strategies for controlling various pollutants that involve the collaboration of government and industries.