Data for an evaluation of the effect of the revision of environmental law on air quality in China_2013-2016
Description
1. The Air Quality Comprehensive Index (AQCI) is calculated with the concentration of six pollutants, and higher AQCI indicates worse air quality. This dataset includes monthly AQCI data of 71 cities 2013-2016, collected from the website of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment (http://www.mee.gov.cn/hjzl/dqhj/cskqzlzkyb/). 2. There are two steps to select the official documents representing the implementation of the New Law. The first step is identifying documents relating to air pollution management, and then the second step is selecting documents relating to the New Law, rather than other regulations. We exclude documents before April 2014, documents on particular events (Olympic Games, G20, etc.), and documents following other laws or regulations. Based on whether one document is consistent with the feature of the New Law and whether it claims its legal basis on the New Law, we finally selected 140 documents. The documents were searched from official city government webs, issued by the city government or the Secretary of the city government. Based on the information, four variables were constructed: the Implementation Dummy for Month (equals to one after a city issues the first document), the Number of Documents (accumulated the number of documents for each month in each city), the Duration of Implementation (the months passed after the first document was issued), the Sum of Documents’ Duration (the sum of the duration of each document). 3. Original GDP data is quarterly GDP of each city during 2013-2016 united in 100 million collected from National Bureau of Statistics of China (http://data.stats.gov.cn/easyquery.htm?cn=E0101) and city governments’ statistics bureau webs. This study took one-third of quarterly GDP as monthly GDP of the end month of the quarter and interpolated it assuming that the GDP change of every month is the same. 4. Original population data is the yearly population of each city at the end of 2013, 2014 and 2015 collected from China Statistics Information Web (http://www.tjcn.org/tjgb/). This variable is monthly population interpolated from yearly data, united in 0.01 million. 5. The city-monthly data of precipitation, temperature, vapour press, wind speed, and humidity were derived from CMDSC-China Meteorological Data Service Center (http://data.cma.cn/data/cdcdetail/dataCode/SURF_CLI_CHN_MUL_MON_CES.html). For cities not included in the dataset, we used weather condition data of the nearest observation station. This dataset does not include these data according to the requirement by the CMDSC. For those whose nationality is Chinese can apply it with their citizenship identification.