Xinye Zheng

Travel mode choice and impact of fuel tax in Beijing

As an international metropolitan area undergoing rapid development, Beijing is facing a sharp rise in the volume of motor vehicles and mobility, which has become the major contributor to the air pollution in this city. This is evident in the recent ranking of Beijing as the most congested as well as the most polluted city in the world by the Millennium Cities Database. Local government has adopted a battery of policies to reduce these problems. In this study, we investigate the impact of increasing the fuel tax on travel mode choice based on a large sample of travel survey data. We estimate that if the price of gasoline increased to a moderate level, 11.53Â RMB/liter, the total car volume on the road would be reduced by 7 per cent, which corresponds to a reduction in CO2 emissions of 786,002.4 tons, or about 8 per cent of vehicular emissions from private cars and company-owned cars in Beijing.

Yardstick Competition and the Formation of Enterprise Zones in China

ABSTRACT While numerous studies have been found to examine the social and economic impacts of enterprise zones, studies on the formation of enterprise zones are surprisingly scant. This study aims to fill such a gap by examining the driving forces behind the formation of enterprise zones in China in the framework of fiscal competition. Using China’s city level data and a spatial econometric technique, we find that Chinese local governments tend to act strategically when considering establishing their own enterprise zones. The formation of enterprise zones seems to be not due to the result of local economic status, but the result of yardstick competition created across local governments.

On the nexus of environmental quality and public spending on health care in China: a panel cointegration analysis

Abstract Does pollution drive up public spending on health care? This paper aims to answer such a crucial question empirically using a panel data set of 31 Chinese provinces during the period 1997–2014. In particular, this paper explores the non-stationarity and cointegration properties between health care expenditure and environmental indicators in a panel cointegration framework; in doing so, it examines both the long-run and the short-run impacts of the per capita provincial GDP, waste gas emissions, dust and smog emissions, and waste water emissions on the per capita public health expenditure. We apply panel unit root tests, heterogeneous panel cointegration tests, FMOLS techniques, and a panel-based error-correction model. The conclusion is that, both in the long run and in the short run, public health care expenditure is positively affected not only by the provincial economy but also by the environmental quality.

A Survey Analysis of Energy Use and Conservation Opportunities in Chinese Households

Based on the detailed CRECS-2012 dataset with 1,450 surveyed households, this study provides a brief overview of Chinese energy consumption at the household level in 2012. Furthermore, this study investigates the various types of household energy conservation behaviour. We have several major findings. First, our results show that a representative Chinese household in 2012 consumed 1,426 kgce (standard coal equivalent), which is approximately 44 % of that in the US in 2009, and 38 % of that in the EU 27 in 2008. Space heating is the most energy-intensive activity in a household, accounting for over half of the consumption. Second, the barrier to energy efficiency in space heating lies in the current pricing system of district heating. In order to improve the individual incentive to conserve energy, the reform should be carried out so that heating charges are made according to the actual usage. Third, although there are various government programmes to subsidise energy-efficient appliances, the purchase rate for less energy-intensive appliances, such as TVs, water heaters and computers, is still low. This calls for more research to understand the determinants of household energy conservation behaviour.

The Resource Curse and Its Transmission Channels: An Empirical Investigation of Chinese Cities’ Panel Data

ABSTRACT This article re-examines the resource curse hypothesis on the city level in China using data from 273 cities during the period 2001–2010. The system GMM dynamic panel estimator is applied to address the potential endogeneity problems. Our empirical analysis suggests that natural resource dependence has a small and insignificant impact on economic output when we control for the negative indirect impacts. If the indirect impacts of the transmission channels through which the resources hinder economic output are included, the total effect of natural resource dependence on economic output increases to 10 times the direct effect. Moreover, the capital investment channel is shown to be the most important of these transmission channels.

Consumption-based greenhouse gas emissions accounting with capital stock change highlights dynamics of fast-developing countries

Traditional consumption-based greenhouse gas emissions accounting attributed the gap between consumption-based and production-based emissions to international trade. Yet few attempts have analyzed the temporal deviation between current emissions and future consumption, which can be explained through changes in capital stock. Here we develop a dynamic model to incorporate capital stock change in consumption-based accounting. The new model is applied using global data for 1995–2009. Our results show that global emissions embodied in consumption determined by the new model are smaller than those obtained from the traditional model. The emissions embodied in global capital stock increased steadily during the period. However, capital plays very different roles in shaping consumption-based emissions for economies with different development characteristics. As a result, the dynamic model yields similar consumption-based emissions estimation for many developed countries comparing with the traditional model, but it highlights the dynamics of fast-developing countries.Traditional carbon accounting attributes gap between consumption- and production-based emissions to international trade. The authors develop a dynamic model that incorporates capital stock change and find it improves estimates for fast-developing countries.

Direct and Indirect Effects of Energy-Intensive Industries on Energy Consumption in China

ABSTRACT In addition to the direct energy consumption during the production process, energy-intensive industries can have indirect effects on energy demand because they are upstream industries and have substantial sectoral linkage across the economy. We quantitatively identify the direct and indirect effects of energy-intensive industries using a two-stage approach. First, we study how aggregate energy consumption responds to economic growth and growth of energy-intensive industries. Next, we study the effects of each energy-intensive industry on economic growth and then calculate the indirect effect of energy-intensive sectors on energy consumption. The results indicate that all six energy-intensive products have strong indirect energy effects, making up 20% to almost 60% of their total effects on energy consumption. The results have important policy implications. With the slowing down growth of energy-intensive industries, we expect that China’s energy consumption is undergoing a structural shift which leads to a much slower growth stage.