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Will strengthening the construction of transportation infrastructure help improve the haze problem? Empirical evidence from China

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Abstract

Enhancing the construction of transportation infrastructure is considered one of the viable pathways to ease traffic congestion and air pollution problems. To investigate whether increasing the level of transportation infrastructure construction can help reduce haze problem, a random-effects model is used to test the effects of haze reduction, based on inter-provincial panel data of 31 Chinese provinces from 2013 to 2017. The empirical results deliver several interesting findings. Firstly, enhancing transportation infrastructure construction has a statistically significant and positive impact on haze emission reduction; secondly, upgrading the industrial structure enhances this optimistic effect. Finally, improving transportation infrastructure construction shows more significant effects in haze reduction within highly polluted areas than lightly polluted cities. Therefore, to reduce haze pollution more effectively, China needs to improve the level of transportation infrastructure construction further and adopt a differentiated haze management strategy for high and low pollution areas.

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Notes

  1. The data is from https://www.chinairn.com/.

  2. The data is from www.gmw.cn.

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Acknowledgements

Thank you for China University of Geosciences for its help in this article. The authors also express sincere gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for their meaningful suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics and Management, China University of Geosciences, Hubei, China

    M. Yi, Y. Guan, Y. Zhang & S. Xu

  2. Accounting College, Wuhan Textile University, Hubei, China

    Z. Zhang

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  1. M. Yi
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  2. Y. Guan
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  3. Y. Zhang
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  4. S. Xu
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  5. Z. Zhang
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Correspondence to Y. Guan.

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No funding was received to assist with the preparation of this manuscript. It should be understood that none of the authors have any financial or scientific conflicts of interest with regard to the research described in this manuscript.

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This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

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Editorial responsibility: Hari Pant.

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Yi, M., Guan, Y., Zhang, Y. et al. Will strengthening the construction of transportation infrastructure help improve the haze problem? Empirical evidence from China. Int. J. Environ. Sci. Technol. 19, 8439–8450 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13762-021-03720-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13762-021-03720-5

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