The health and socioeconomic costs of exposure to soil pollution: evidence from three polluted mining and industrial sites in Europe

Pierre Levasseur (), Katrin Erdlenbruch and Christelle Gramaglia ()
Additional contact information
Christelle Gramaglia: UMR G-EAU - Gestion de l'Eau, Acteurs, Usages - Cirad - Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement - BRGM - Bureau de Recherches Géologiques et Minières - IRD - Institut de Recherche pour le Développement - AgroParisTech - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement - Institut Agro Montpellier - Institut Agro - Institut national d'enseignement supérieur pour l'agriculture, l'alimentation et l'environnement

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Aim: This article aims at providing a better understanding of the health and socioeconomic costs induced by soil pollution exposure.Subject: We conduct quantitative surveys in households living near mining and/or industrial sites in France, Spain, and Portugal, as well as those located in cleaner neighboring areas.Method: We employ a complementary estimation approach based on ordinary least squares, instrumental variables, and propensity score matching.Results: Our results confirm significant life-long health risks for residents of polluted areas compared to those in control areas. We find lower birth weight and lower childhood health status, as well as a higher risk of chronic disease in adulthood and higher premature mortality. Regarding the socioeconomic costs, we find higher rates of school absenteeism and health service demand among residents from polluted areas compared to control areas. Furthermore, we observe heterogeneous effects according to sociodemographic characteristics. As expected, children and the elderly are the most sensitive age groups; in addition, materially deprived and uneducated households are particularly vulnerable to pollution. More surprisingly, there is some evidence of higher vulnerability of educated households with regard to birth outcomes.Conclusion: Our results have important implications for public policy: they allow alerting about actually observed health risks in the exposed areas, but they also call for designing awareness campaigns and remedial strategies that are targeted towards the most vulnerable

Keywords: Mining and industrial sites; Pollution; Absenteeism; Reported health outcomes; Southwestern Europe (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env, nep-eur and nep-res
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-03205207v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in Journal of Public Health, 2022, 30, pp.2533-2546. ⟨10.1007/s10389-021-01533-x⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-03205207v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03205207

DOI: 10.1007/s10389-021-01533-x

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().