Revisiting urban environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis: evidence from carbon emissions in China's prefecture-level and above cities

More and more prefecture-level cities in China are putting forward their own carbon peak and carbon neutrality goals and formulating corresponding action roadmaps to this end. However, the key to achieving these goals is to identify the position of cities in the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC), and on this basis to formulate the best policy mix to reach the EKC inflection point. This paper estimates the EKC hypothesis using carbon emissions panel data covering 287 prefecture-level cities. It aims to pinpoint to the GDP per capita at which carbon emissions peak. The robustness results based on instrumental variable estimation guarantee show that the GDP per capita at the peak of upside-down U-shaped EKC is 120,000 Yuan RMB, while the corresponding values of cities in eastern and northeastern regions are discrete, and are about 110,000 Yuan RMB and 160,000 Yuan RMB, respectively. This regional disparity is primarily characterized by the observation that cities in the eastern region exhibit a decreasing beyond the peak, contrary to other regions, differentiated urban carbon management rather than a one size fits all policy is imperative.