EKC Test of the Relationship between Nitrogen Dioxide Pollution and Economic Growth—A Spatial Econometric Analysis Based on Chinese City Data

During the just concluded 13th Five-Year Plan, China continued to maintain the momentum of rapid economic development, but still faced environmental pollution problems caused by this. Finding the relationship between Nitrogen Dioxide pollution and economic development is helpful and significant in better achieving and optimizing sustainable environmental development. Taking China’s 333 prefecture-level cities as samples from 2016 to 2018, the spatial lag model (SAR) was used to study the impact of economic growth on urban Nitrogen Dioxide pollution. The results show that Nitrogen Dioxide has strong positive characteristics of spatial spillover, but there is a linear relationship between economic growth and Nitrogen Dioxide concentration that slowly rises, and there is no inverted U-shaped relationship, which does not support the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis; The results also show the impact of per capita GDP, natural gas consumption, residential natural gas consumption, industrialization, and transportation development on the increase of Nitrogen Dioxide concentration, and the impact of green coverage on the decrease of Nitrogen Dioxide concentration. However, there is no significant relationship between technological investment and Nitrogen Dioxide concentration. The above conclusions are still valid after the robustness test, and recommendations are put forward to reduce Nitrogen Dioxide pollution.