Air pollutions and its control governance in Chinese provinces in post-COVID-19 era: panel estimations of provincial environmental Kuznets curves

China’s rapid industrialization and urbanization in recent decades have deteriorated its air environmental quality. This study focuses on air pollutions in terms of CO, NO2, O3, PM2.5, PM10, and SO2 in Chinese provinces. Although the heterogeneity of environmental Kuznets curves (EKCs) from Chinese provinces has been studied, the positions of provincial EKCs (which reflect the province-specific pollution effects not affected by the provincial income levels) have not been investigated to date. Therefore, through a factor analysis of the heterogeneity of provincial pollutions under the EKC framework, we investigate how the governance shortage for pollution control contributes to the provincial pollution levels. We found that the governance shortage for pollution control accounted for about 50-70% of the province-specific air pollution levels. Our results indicate that China still has a much policy space to mitigate air pollutions. Particularly, in the Post-COVID-19 Era when industrial activities are recovered, pollution-control governance would be vital to make China’s economic growth sustainable.