Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The topic of the study is important and interesting.

The aim, results and discussion are formulated in a clear way. However, I have got one suggestion for author/s.

Page 8, line 284 - You should indicate the numbers of lines in Table 1., because it is difficult to catch the idea of this first sentence.

Author Response

 

Please see the attachment.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This article is quite interesting as it tries to optimize the impact of environmental policies on the economy and the environment. As we know implementing an effective environmental policy compares the marginal cost of reducing pollution with the marginal benefit of a clean environment. There are already many papers that have tried to address this issue and the authors provide a literature review that summarizes the past work. However the literature review seems to be randomly explained. It would be better if the authors classify the past work based on a specific scheme (like similar topics,  type of environmental regulations, etc). It is also important to add past works on the problems related to regional imbalances. There are already some papers that have addressed this aspect. Li et al (2018), for example, address the problem of unequal regional growth and hence unequal carbon emissions and proposes a regional unbalanced carbon tax scheme to address the regional disparity in CO2 emissions.

The authors should also clearly first identify the sources of air/ water pollution in China and state the significance of their model. For example the main source of air pollution in China is the emissions of fine particles by combustion and industrial processes. In this sense the government needs to tackle effectively the rely on coal combustion for electricity production and improve the efficiency of energy intensive industries. The authors should clarify how their proposal will effectively reduce air pollution by tackling its main sources.

Note: the reference details are provided below

Li Z; Dai H; Sun L; Xie Y; Liu Z; Wan P, Yabar H (2018) Exploring the impacts of regional unbalanced carbon tax on CO2 emissions and industrial competitiveness in Liaoning province of China. Energy Policy 113:9-19

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I believe the authors have addressed the my questions/comments and I recommend the publication of this article.