Measuring urban environmental performance in China: A Euclidean distance function approach.
J Environ Manage
; 361: 121272, 2024 Jun.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-38820790
ABSTRACT
Air pollution has been one of the biggest environmental challenges for cities in their pursuit of sustainability. The removal of air pollutants usually entails a cost that can negatively impact economic activities. Assessing urban environmental performance can offer valuable insights for cities to balance their economic production and environmental protection. This paper develops a novel approach to measuring environmental performance by using the Euclidean distance function. An appealing feature of this approach is its ability in endogenously allocating the optimization pathway to each emitter, thereby avoiding arbitrary estimation results and distorted managerial implications. We apply this approach to study the environmental performance of Chinese key environmental protection cities. We find the heterogeneity in performance estimates and endogenous optimization pathways. Prioritizing the reduction of a specific type of emissions while simultaneously increasing industrial output value seems to be the most appropriate objective for the majority of cities. Our study can serve as a basis for urban governments to pinpoint the underlying factors contributing to low urban environmental performance and establish diverse objectives for enhancing environmental performance.
Key words
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Cities
/
Air Pollution
Country/Region as subject:
Asia
Language:
En
Journal:
J Environ Manage
Year:
2024
Document type:
Article
Affiliation country: