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Effects of environmental policy on consumption: lessons from the Chinese plastic bag regulation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2012

Haoran He
Haoran He
Affiliation:
School of Economics and Business Administration, Beijing Normal University, 100875 Beijing, China. Tel: +86 10 5880 7847. Fax: +86 10 5880 1867. Email: haoran.he@bnu.edu.cn. Also Department of Economics, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Tel: +46 31 786 47 28. Fax: +46 31 773 10 43. Email: haoran.he@economics.gu.se
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Abstract

To reduce plastic bag litter, China introduced a nationwide regulation requiring all retailers to charge for plastic shopping bags on 1 June 2008. By using the policy implementation as a natural experiment and collecting individual-level data before and after the implementation, we investigate the impacts of the regulation on consumers’ bag use. We find that the regulation implementation caused a 49 per cent reduction in the use of new bags. Besides regulation enforcement, consumers’ attitude toward the regulation and some consumers’ socioeconomic characteristics also affected bag consumption. However, the regulation effects differ largely among consumer groups and among regions and shopping occasions.

Type
Theory and Applications
Information
Environment and Development Economics , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , August 2012 , pp. 407 - 431
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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