Can Low-carbon Transition Promote Common Prosperity:Evidence from Low-carbon City Pilots
Solidly advancing common prosperity requires efforts to improve residents'income and consumption,and multi-dimensional improvements in residents'welfare conditions through education,culture,health,and social secu-rity,as well as the narrowing of the income disparities among residents in different regions.Chinese modernization aims for common prosperity of all people and emphasizes harmonious coexistence between humans and nature.However,exist-ing literature has not yet analyzed the role of low-carbon city construction in promoting common prosperity in various re-gions from the perspective of environmental regulation.Therefore,it is of practical significance for this paper to investi-gate the impact of the low-carbon transition on regional common prosperity based on the quasi-natural experiment of the construction of low-carbon cities.According to the connotation of common prosperity,this paper constructs indicators of common prosperity from the dimensions of material prosperity,spiritual prosperity,and social sharing.Using the panel data of 284 cities from 2006 to 2020,this paper employs a difference-in-differences(DID)model to examine the impact of low-carbon city construction on regional common prosperity and to analyze its underlying mechanisms.On the one hand,low-carbon city construction can optimize the industrial structure,and improve industrial innovation and the rationalization of the industrial structure.On the other hand,low-carbon city construction increases the number of jobs,expands employment channels,adjusts the mobility and distribution of labor among industries,and reduces labor mismatch,which is conducive to the enhancement of common prosperity.The findings of this paper suggest that low-carbon city construction exerts a significantly positive effect on the overall level of regional common prosperity,and contributes to the regional common prosperity in the dimensions of spiritual prosperity,material prosperity and social sharing significantly.These results pass the robustness tests of parallel trends,the exclusion of the effects of other environmental policies during the same period,and the using of the inverse tempera-ture intensity as an instrumental variable.Heterogeneity tests indicate that low-carbon city construction has a more promi-nent effect on common prosperity of non-resource-based cities due to their more diversified economic development modes and lower resource dependence.In addition,low-carbon city construction has a more favorable impact on common pros-perity in the eastern region and in cities with better financial development.Mechanism tests reveal that low-carbon city construction promotes common prosperity through the optimization and upgrading of the industrial structure and the im-provement of employment.This paper sheds policy insights for promoting urban green low-carbon transition and explor-ing the realization paths of common prosperity.The contributions of this paper are essentially in the following aspects.Firstly,this paper combines the environmen-tal regulation policy with common prosperity,and uses prefecturallevel panel data to explore whether low-carbon city construction promotes common prosperity,which is valuable for expanding studies on environmental regulation and com-mon prosperity and exploring the realization paths of common prosperity.Secondly,most of existing studies combed the overall theoretical framework or measured the realization degree of common prosperity with the data of a province,but they did not examine common prosperity of each prefecture-level city.Therefore,according to the theoretical connotation that common prosperity includes both material and spiritual prosperity,this paper constructs the evaluation index system of common prosperity at the city level in multiple dimensions,such as material prosperity,spiritual prosperity,and social sharing.Thirdly,this paper explores the mechanisms of the impact of low-carbon city construction on common prosperity and examines the heterogeneous effects of low-carbon city construction on common prosperity for different types of cities.
Low-carbon TransitionCommon ProsperityOptimization and Upgrading of Industrial StructureImprovement of Employment
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