TY - JOUR
T1 - Operation of high-speed rail and reduction of corporate pollution
T2 - evidence from China
AU - Liu, Su
AU - Zhang, Yunlong
AU - Cai, Jinyang
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.
PY - 2023/1
Y1 - 2023/1
N2 - As an environmentally friendly means of transport, the high-speed rail (HSR) is conducive to promoting corporate performance. An innovative approach extends the impact of HSR networks on pollution emissions from the regional level to the micro-enterprise level. Based on the quasi-natural experiment of the opening of HSR, a difference-in-difference model is used to investigate the impact of HSR on enterprise pollution emission levels and its action mechanism by using the matched data from the Chinese Enterprise Pollution Emission Database, the Chinese Industrial Enterprise Database, and the Chinese City Statistical Yearbook from 2000 to 2010. The results show that opening HSR significantly reduces the enterprises’ pollution emission level, while reducing the number of polluting enterprises and transportation costs as well as improving the innovation capacity of enterprises are the corresponding action mechanisms. The impact of HSR on the enterprises’ pollution emission varies with industry intensity, population size, and regional economic development level. The conclusions not only provide important insights to increase the ecological quality of China’s environment through transportation infrastructure upgrades but also bring some guidance to more developing countries to improve their air environment.
AB - As an environmentally friendly means of transport, the high-speed rail (HSR) is conducive to promoting corporate performance. An innovative approach extends the impact of HSR networks on pollution emissions from the regional level to the micro-enterprise level. Based on the quasi-natural experiment of the opening of HSR, a difference-in-difference model is used to investigate the impact of HSR on enterprise pollution emission levels and its action mechanism by using the matched data from the Chinese Enterprise Pollution Emission Database, the Chinese Industrial Enterprise Database, and the Chinese City Statistical Yearbook from 2000 to 2010. The results show that opening HSR significantly reduces the enterprises’ pollution emission level, while reducing the number of polluting enterprises and transportation costs as well as improving the innovation capacity of enterprises are the corresponding action mechanisms. The impact of HSR on the enterprises’ pollution emission varies with industry intensity, population size, and regional economic development level. The conclusions not only provide important insights to increase the ecological quality of China’s environment through transportation infrastructure upgrades but also bring some guidance to more developing countries to improve their air environment.
KW - Difference-in-difference model
KW - Enterprise pollution
KW - High-speed rail
KW - Number of polluting firms
KW - Transportation cost
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85135836418&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s11356-022-22403-3
DO - 10.1007/s11356-022-22403-3
M3 - Article
C2 - 35947263
AN - SCOPUS:85135836418
SN - 0944-1344
VL - 30
SP - 3562
EP - 3575
JO - Environmental Science and Pollution Research
JF - Environmental Science and Pollution Research
IS - 2
ER -