Tao Jing, Zameer Hashim, Song Haohao
School of Business, Jinling Institute of Technology, Nanjing, 211169, Jiangsu, China.
College of Economics and Management, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, 211106, Jiangsu, China.
Sci Rep. 2024 Sep 3;14(1):20520. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-70762-3.
The aim of this paper is to explore whether and how urban road transport (URT) development affects haze pollution. One of the innovations of this paper is that URT development is measured by road accessibility with novel digital elevation model datasets, which have been used by few scholars. The endogenous problem caused by revere causality issue in the relationship between URT development and haze pollution is also considered. Based on the panel data of prefecture-level cities of Yangtze River Delta (YRD) region in China from 2011 to 2018, this paper uses long-lagged values of URT development as the instrumental variable, employing the two-stage least squares (2SLS) method. The study shows that URT development leads to an increase of haze pollution. Moreover, mechanism tests based on moderating and mediating models support the finding that decreasing haze pollution resulted from better connection effects, while rising agglomeration effects tend to bring about increasing haze pollution, and the latter effect is larger in magnitude than the former. Current URT development may have long-term negative consequences for livability of YRD cities, and urban decision makers should reconsider the effectiveness of the current road transport investment and construction.
本文旨在探讨城市道路运输（URT）发展是否以及如何影响雾霾污染。本文的创新之一在于，利用新颖的数字高程模型数据集通过道路可达性来衡量URT发展，很少有学者使用过这些数据集。同时也考虑了URT发展与雾霾污染之间关系中由反向因果问题引起的内生性问题。基于2011年至2018年中国长江三角洲（YRD）地区地级市的面板数据，本文使用URT发展的长期滞后值作为工具变量，采用两阶段最小二乘法（2SLS）。研究表明，URT发展导致雾霾污染增加。此外，基于调节和中介模型的机制检验支持了以下发现：更好的连接效应导致雾霾污染减少，而集聚效应增强往往会带来雾霾污染增加，且后者的影响程度大于前者。当前的URT发展可能会给YRD城市的宜居性带来长期负面影响，城市决策者应重新考虑当前道路运输投资和建设的有效性。
