Empirical research on influential factors of air pollution in Chinese provincial capital cities

Abstract

With the rapid development of China's economy, air pollution has gradually drawn experts and governors' attention. To investigate possible socioeconomic influential factors and distribution traits of air pollution in China, this paper adopts the static panel data regression and cluster analysis on the panel data of the air quality index of 30 provincial capital cities. The results of the research indicate that Chinese provincial capital cities can be divided into three categories based on the degree of contamination of the six typical pollutants. The research also find that industrial structure, green energy and the number of cars can significantly affect air pollution in capital cities, but the population density does not have a significant effect.