Environmental Research Letters | 2019
The impact of environmental protection tax on sectoral and spatial distribution of air pollution emissions in China
Abstract
Environmental problems, associated with climate change and air pollution, have become increasingly \nserious for China in recent years, which have aroused great domestic and international concerns. To \nmitigate these problems with great efforts, the Chinese government has implemented the \nEnvironmental Protection Tax Law in the whole country since the beginning of 2018. Although the \nnew tax law is perceived as an aggressive policy that tends to establish a taxation system for promoting \nair pollution control, evaluations of its effectiveness are insufficient and urgently needed for China. \nUsing a multiregion multisector Computable General Equilibrium model, we, for the first time, \nquantify the impacts of this‘pollution tax’ policy on modulating air pollutants emissions. Our analysis \nshows that current tax policy is generally able to reduce many short-lived air pollutants emissions(e.g. \nSO2, NOX, TSP, PM10, PM2.5, CO, VOCs, OC, NH3 and BC), but the significant effects only happen in \nregions with large economic scale (i.e. Guangdong, Shandong and Zhejiang provinces) and in sectors \nwith high emission intensity (i.e. the electric power and nonmetal manufacturing sectors). However, \nat the national level, the overall effect of the current policy on air pollution mitigation is relatively \nsmall, less than 2% compared to a business-as-usual scenario. Large emission reduction potentials \nexist if the tax increases. Therefore, a more ambitious tax policy is urgently needed in order to achieve \nChina’s air pollution mitigation target of 2020. We also find that in China for implementing any \npollution tax policies, the rate of decline in CO2 emissions is much larger than those of short-lived \npollutants, which indicates a huge co-benefit on global climate change mitigation.