Blue Skies Over Beijing (Princeton Press 2016) by Kahn and Zheng

The March 2019 JEL has published a review of my co-authored (joint with Siqi Zheng of MIT) 2016 Princeton Press book: Blue Skies Over Beijing: Economic Growth and the Environment in China.  The book and its first chapter can be found here.

Our book asks big questions;

1.  Why did China become so polluted?

2.  Why do Chinese urbanites increasingly demand “blue skies”?

3.  In the distinctive Chinese Communist System, do local and national officials have incentives to respond to the growing desire for blue skies?

4.  How do China’s different cities compete against each other for jobs and people?

5.  How does the system of cities create a menu of locational possibilities for people who cannot directly vote for their leaders?

The least innovative part of the book is our discussion of the supply of pollution.  We know that burning coal and industrialization and the usual scale effects have driven the rise of pollution.

Throughout the book, we bring together ideas from environmental and urban economics to discuss the local and global environmental costs associated with China’s economic growth.

When you walk around U.S universities, you see thousands of Chinese students.  The future of China’s economy is as a human capital, skills economy.  People’s quality of life and productivity is directly injured by exposure to local pollution.  Even in a nation where people do not directly vote, the rising new cohorts of educated worldly people seek out higher amenities.  In the past in China, pollution was a byproduct of economic growth.  Moving forward, pollution will hinder urban economic growth because polluted cities will not attract and retain the skilled. Beijing as a capital city is special because o the monopoly power of the Central Government but even there — there is pressure for progress.

Our book’s chapters on the national and the local government’s incentives to supply blue skies builds on our 2014  paper published in RSUE and my co-authored 2015 paper in AEJ.    I don’t think that our reviewer did a good job discussing our contributions there.  This book is targeted for a general audience and our interviews with mayors brought out interesting nuances that reduced form research cannot reveal.

I have the sense that many Western Readers do not want to hear evidence that quality of life is improving in Communist China.  Such quality of life progress lowers the likelihood of regime change.  If life is miserable under a dictatorship, then change is more likely to take place.   Conservatives have deep military concerns with respect to China and progressives have deep civil rights concerns with China.  Good news about China doesn’t sell but does that mean that the progress cannot and should be discussed?