Narrow Results

This paper employs an overlapping-generations (OLG) model with altruistic motive and lifetime uncertainty to investigate the urban public pension system in China. Focusing on the case of Beijing, we examine the effects of the individual contribution rate, firm contribution rate, life expectancy and population growth rate on the capital-labor ratio, savings, per capita consumption and pension benefits. By controlling the firm contribution rate to adjust the capital-labor ratio of the market economy to the modified golden rule level, we find the optimal firm contribution rate. We also discuss the optimal firm contribution rate in Beijing under three cases: risen life expectancy, fallen population growth rate and the joint case of risen life expectancy and fallen population growth rate, and estimate the optimal firm contribution rate in 2020s. Integrating the established effects and the current economic goals, it is concluded that it will do more good than harm to strictly implement Beijing municipal population policy, improve the living and medical conditions, reduce the firm contribution rate, and raise the individual contribution rate.

Haze pollution’s harm to residents’ health has become a public topic arousing the national, social and public concerns. This paper, taking Beijing as an example, quantitatively evaluated the current situation and historical changes of health-related economic loss caused by haze pollution across Beijing’s districts, based on the data from 2009 to 2016 on air pollutant concentration, pathology and health statistics. The results show that health-related economic loss caused by haze pollution of Beijing in 2016 was about RMB 67.925 billion. The most severe health loss was seen in Chaoyang, Haidian and Fengtai districts, while less health loss was found in Yanqing, Mentougou and Huairou districts. This is mainly attributed to the differences in pollutants emission, local population and geographic location. Judging from the trend, the health loss caused by air pollution across Beijing saw a wavelike rise first, followed by a decrease year by year, from 2009 to 2016; but the loss in 2016 was at least 1.1 times that in 2009. The control over air pollution faces severe challenges. Therefore, it is urgently needed to address haze pollution in line with the local conditions of Beijing and take gradual steps to incorporate health loss caused by air pollution into the balance sheet accounting system of natural resources.

There is a coupling relationship between the development of urban transportation and cities: Urban growth leads to increase in the demand for urban transportation and consequently, a lot of transportation emissions. Therefore, an in-depth understanding of the mechanism behind the driving effect of urban development on transportation emissions is a crucial prerequisite for coordinated development of low-carbon urban transportation and cities. Based on the oil product allocation method, this paper estimates the transportation emission in Beijing from 1995 to 2016. Then based on the understanding of the driving mechanism, this paper applies the urban allometric scaling law to analyze the relationship between city size and transportation emission. Finally, the driving mechanism is analyzed using the STRIPAT model. The results reveal a superlinear relationship between transportation emission in Beijing and the expansion of the city, as the former outgrew the latter. Population size, urbanization, economic size, industrial structure, spatial scale and infrastructure construction are positive driving factors of transportation emission, whereas progress of energy technologies as a negative driving factor can restrain the growth of transportation emission. Urbanization has the most significant impact on urban transportation emission, and economic size contributes the most to the growth of transportation emission. Based on the results, we make a few policy recommendations for low-carbon urban transportation of Beijing, which include: improving transportation efficiency in the process of urbanization; promoting energy conservation and emission reduction while pursuing economic development so as to decouple transportation emission from urban development; restricting unordered urban expansion and updating the concept of transportation infrastructure supply; and developing energy technologies to improve energy efficiency.

In recent years, Beijing has been more often confronted with serious haze pollution, especially in autumn and winter. The People’s Government of Beijing Municipality has adopted a package of measures to control the haze pollution with its best efforts. To objectively evaluate how effective these haze pollution control measures are from different perspectives and in an all-round way, it is necessary to adopt a scientific and reasonable approach. Based on the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) idea, we establish a system of indexes to evaluate the government performance of Beijing in haze pollution control from the four perspectives of development quality, public services, government management and development potential, and use a combination of analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and entropy weight method (EWM) to determine the index weights, and objectively evaluate Beijing’s performance in haze pollution control from 2010 to 2016. The results show that the scores for the four perspectives are all on the rise, and since the implementation of the Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan in 2013, the government’s haze pollution control measures have achieved significant results, and made a much higher overall score. On that basis, we propose the optimized path for Beijing’s haze pollution control, namely, accelerating the upgrading of development quality, improving the public services level, strengthening the government management, tapping the development potential of haze pollution control and increasing the linkage and cooperation between the governments of Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei.