How Does Environmental Regulation Affect Carbon Emissions? —Evidence from China

Abstract

In this paper, the increment of CO2 emissions from 285 prefecture-level cities in China from 2004 to 2013 is decomposed into scale effect, composition effect and technique effect. Based on the decomposition results, the effects of different environmental regulation on carbon emission increment and its decomposition effect were studied by using multiple regression methods. The results show that carbon emission environmental regulation, sulfur dioxide emission environmental regulation and electricity prices also significantly reduce the city’s carbon emissions, in which carbon emission reduction environmental regulation has the best effect, followed by sulfur dioxide emission reduction environmental regulation. Different environmental regulations do not significantly reduce urban carbon emissions in terms of composition effects, and even increase carbon emissions of cities. In addition, the impacts of different environmental regulations on the cities in the two control zones and the non-control zone were studied. Compared with non-control zone cities, environmental regulations for carbon emission and SO2 have a better effect on carbon emission reduction in cities of two control zones.