The Impact Of Traffic Restrictions On Air Quality During The APEC Meeting

With the rapid economic development, China’s economy and people’s living standards have greatly improved in the 21st century. With the upgrading of the economy and living standards, people’s quality of life requirements are also gradually increase, especially for air quality requirements. It has increase people’s concern for air pollution that two long massive haze occurred in the eastern part of our country in 2013. The air pollution from motor vehicle exhaust pollution is growing very fast, so the government has introduced a variety of public policy to combat it.APEC meeting held in Beijing November 11-November 5,2014. In order to ensure air quality and ease traffic congestion, the odd-and-even traffic restricting executed during the meeting. In recent years, the research on the restrict policy gradually increased. But before the meeting, the majority of the restrict policies are implemented in a single city, not in a number of cities to promote the implementation. Thus, most of the research are time series analysis, or to focus on the analysis of one city,they had not a certain replicability. With the understanding of air pollution mobility features, this restrict policy executed in four provinces (municipalities) Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Shandong. The inter-city panel data exists two control groups, restrict period with non-restrict period in time and restrict city with non-restrict city in space. The existence of two control groups make this research easy to carry out.In this paper, we use the inter-provincial panel data(the data is from October 20 to November 14 in 2014) to research the impact of restrict policy and other factors (weather, holiday and so on) on air quality. Firstly, we compare the statistical characteristics of the variables in restrict and non-restrict period, analyze whether air quality has improved in restrict period, and investigate other factors change. Secondly, we use a short panel data to analysis the impact of restrict policy on air quality and other factors. Although we found the restrict policy has a role in improving air quality, but some factors directions coefficient is irregular. Thirdly,using the Diff-in-Diff method, we analyze the effectiveness of the restrict policy with the contrast of restrict city and non-restrict city. After eliminating the influence of other factors, we found that the restrict policy has significantly improved effect on air quality. Finally, using the Event Study, we analyze the effect of restrict policy with the contrast of restrict period and non-restrict period. We found that restrict policy has certain regulatory issues in the latter part of the implementation, also found that the effect of restrict policy has effect in the short term and need other supporting policies in the long term.By using the Diff-in-Diff method and Event Study method, we conclude that the improving effect of restrict policy is worthy of recognition, but it has some regulatory and short-term issues. For these problems, we propose relevant policy recommendations. On the one hand, the regulation of the policy implemention need maintain the same intensity scale from the beginning to the end. On the other hand, the restrict policy need coordinate with other complementary policies in the long term. For example, improve fuel quality, develop new energy vehicles, control the population of vehicle, increase the investment of public transport and so on.