City-level environmental performance in China

Measuring cities’ environmental performance can provide an analytical foundation for evaluating and comparing the governmental efforts in improving environmental performance and promoting sustainable development. In this paper, we employ an Environmental Performance Index (EPI) to measure the environmental performance of 105 prefecture-level cities from 2006 to 2013 in China. Based on the city-level results, we can further derive the EPIs of different regions as well as the country. Our empirical results showed that there exists a large variation in the environmental performance of different cities. From the regional perspective, the EPI of eastern region was higher than that of western region, although the two regions were close to each other. The difference of EPI increasing led to an unstable increase in the overall EPI of the country. Furthermore, based on influence factor analysis, economic scale and industrial structure had a significant impact on the environmental performance of cities and then came up with suggestions to formulate the environmental policies, keeping in view the economic background and the other pragmatic characteristics of cities. © 2018, Joint Center on Global Change and Earth System Science of the University of Maryland and Beijing Normal University and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.