Impact of the Low-Carbon City Pilot Policy on Residents' Health: The Dual Pathways of Pollutant Emissions and Green Behavior

Abstract

The low-carbon city pilot (LCCP) policy plays an important role in promoting green transformation, but evidence on its impact on residents' health remains lacking, especially research identifying its internal and external dual transmission mechanisms. Based on panel data from 285 prefecture-level cities in China from 2003 to 2020, the multiperiod difference-in-difference, mediating and moderating models are used to explore path of LCCP affecting residents' health. The results show that LCCP significantly improves residents' health, with a core coefficient of 0.0375. Output efficiency declines in later pilot cities, and compliance costs in less developed cities may crowd out health investment. Mechanism analysis reveals that LCCP promotes residents' health through the dual paths: reducing pollutant emissions (in air pollution with of -0.18 and solid waste with -0.126) and guiding residents' low-carbon behavior with a coefficient of 0.542. Meanwhile, the moderating effects show that environmental supervision intensity, innovation and pollution control efficiency have positive moderating effect. In addition, heterogeneity analysis indicates that the positive effect of low-carbon economy on residents' health in developing cities in the west is smaller than that in developed cities in the east, and that of non-capital cities is more significant. Therefore, the dual paths and multiple moderating effects discovered in this study provide empirical evidence for evaluating the public health value of LCCP. Future research may adopt micro survey data to expand heterogeneity analysis and carry out interdisciplinary studies combining environmental economics and public health.