Climate policy in emerging economies: Evidence from China’s Low-Carbon City Pilot

In this paper, we assess the effectiveness of early climate policy in emerging economies by causally evaluating the impact of China’s Low-carbon City Pilot (LCCP) on city-level per-capita CO2 emissions and CO2 intensity of GDP over the period 2003–2017. The idiosyncrasies of the policy design pose significant challenges for causal identification, which we overcome within a synthetic control framework. Contrary to previous contributions, our results suggest that the LCCP had no significant impact on either carbon emissions or intensity. The main takeaway of our empirical investigation is that even in emerging economies, effective environmental policy requires transparent, quantifiable targets, and credible enforcement.