The Total Emission Control (TEC) policy has been implemented in China for >20 years and plays a pivotal role in China's environmental governance system. Given the current reality of prominent environmental issues in China, there is ongoing controversy regarding whether the TEC policy has effectively reduced pollution as desired. Inspired by this, this paper takes the TEC policy implemented in the 11th Five Year Plan as an example, and based on the manually collected city-level SO2 emission reduction targets, we construct a difference-in-differences evaluation framework to investigate the abate...
