Chinese resource-exhausted cities face more severe environmental pollution problems than other cities. In addressing these problems, the way local officials (usually senior party and government leaders) operate is very important, as their focus on political achievements may complicate how they manage environmental pollution in these cities. On the one hand, the traditional Gross Domestic Product-based quest for political achievement may lead top leaders to de-emphasize environmental pollution. On the other hand, changes made in 2003 to the way the performance of Chinese officials is evaluated have encouraged some local senior party and government leaders to pay more attention to environmental problems. Based on this, we analyze the relationship between political incentives and environmental pollution by applying the 2004–2014 panel data from 37 resource-exhausted cities. The findings reveal that firstly, among the factors which impact the environmental pollution of resource-exhausted cities, investment in fixed assets, foreign direct investment, industrial structure, per-capita education expenditure, and population density do not have a significant impact, thus indicating that local openness levels, the degree of industrial upgrading, and local investment in fixed assets are not the key variables in environmental pollution control. Secondly, the extent to which officials vie for political achievement affects environmental pollution in resource-exhausted cities. This depends upon whether the officials are municipal party secretaries or mayors; the former play a greater dynamic role in environmental pollution and have stronger robustness than the latter. The conclusion verifies both the existing authority structure of China and its effectiveness in the control of environmental pollution of resource-exhausted cities. That is to say, in contrast to the principles of the party committees, the mayors are in a subordinate position and often fail to fully and effectively exercise their functions. Accordingly, we point out that the selection of municipal party secretaries, rather than mayors, is particularly important in coming to terms with local environmental pollution.

This paper proposes a centralized data envelopment analysis (DEA) model for industrial optimization based on several different production technologies among several regions. We developed this model based on improved Kuosmanen environmental DEA technology, which avoids positive shadow price on undesirable outputs. We also designed a dual model for our centralized DEA model, and used it to analyze shadow prices on CO₂ emissions. We further employed the proposed model to determine the optimal path for controlling CO₂ emissions at the sector level for each province in China. At sectoral level, manufacturing showed the highest potential emissions reduction, and transportation was the largest accepter of emission quotas. At regional level, western and northeastern areas faced the largest adjustments in allowable emissions, while central and eastern areas required the least amount of adjustment. Because our model represents increase or decrease in emissions bidirectionally in terms of shadow price analysis, this setting makes the shadow price on CO₂ emissions lower than strong regulation (decreasing CO₂ emissions along with increasing value added) used by directional distance function (DDF).

With the deterioration caused by environmental pollution, studies on the low-carbon economy have received more attention. As far as we know, electricity production accounts for a large portion of total carbon emissions. Therefore, based on panel data from 2005 to 2014, we used the non-radial directional distance function model based on the data envelope analysis (DEA) to evaluate the static electricity product efficiency of various provinces in China. Further, the global Malmquist index was introduced to analyze the main factors. The relationship between the environmental policy stringency and the regional power production efficiency was also investigated. Static results show that China’s regional power production efficiency has a significant difference between coastal developed and inland areas. Dynamic evaluation further proved that the difference is mainly due to technological change. Finally, regression results show that technological change is the only factor directly affecting regional environmental policy stringency.