关键词: 低碳城市试点政策, 环境福利绩效, 双重差分法, 绿色转型

Abstract: Under the carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals, the Chinese path to modernization has put forward clear requirements for promoting green development and improving residents’ welfare. In this context, accurately assessing the impact of the low-carbon city pilot (LCCP) policy on environmental welfare performance is greatly beneficial to promoting comprehensive green transformation of the economy and society. Based on the background of the low carbon city construction, this paper explains the potential impact of the LCCP policy on environmental welfare performance, employs the Hybrid-Network Data Envelopment Analysis Model to accurately measure environmental welfare performance, and empirically examines the impact of the LCCP policy on environmental welfare performance and its mechanism using the difference-in-difference method. The results indicate that the LCCP policy can significantly improve environmental welfare performance. This conclusion still holds after hypothesis testing and constructing group-period estimators, interpolation estimators, and stacked regression estimators for testing the heterogeneity of the policy treatment effect. The heterogeneity analysis shows that the LCCP policy is more significant in improving the environmental welfare performance in the eastern and western cities, non-resource-based cities, high administrative level cities, large cities as well as supercities and even larger cities in China. Mechanism analysis proves that the LCCP policy mainly improves environmental welfare performance by optimizing industrial structure, improving green technology, and accumulating human capital, and reduces environmental welfare performance by exacerbating capital misallocation. The spatial effect analysis shows that, under the economic geographic nesting spatial weight matrix and dialectal social network spatial weight matrix, the LCCP policy exerts a positive spatial spillover effect on environmental welfare performance of surrounding areas. This paper provides not only new evidence on the impact of the LCCP policy on environmental welfare performance but also theoretical support and policy-making reference for building low-carbon cities, achieving green economic transformation, and improving residents’ environmental welfare.

Key words: Low-carbon City Pilot Policy, Environmental Welfare Performance, Difference-in- difference Method, Green Transformation