COVID-19, City Lockdowns, And Air Pollution: Evidence from China

Guojun He, Yuhang Pan () and Takanao Tanaka ()
Additional contact information
Yuhang Pan: Division of Environment and Sustainability, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong
Takanao Tanaka: Division of Social Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong.

No 2020-72, HKUST IEMS Working Paper Series from HKUST Institute for Emerging Market Studies

Abstract: The rapid spread of COVID-19 is a global public health challenge. To prevent the escalation of its transmission, China locked down one-third of its cities and strictly restricted personal mobility and economic activities. Using timely and comprehensive air quality data in China, we show that these counter-COVID-19 measures led to a remarkable improvement in air quality. Within weeks, the Air Quality Index and PM2.5 concentrations were brought down by 25%. The effects are larger in colder, richer, and more industrialized cities. We estimate that such improvement would avert 24,000 to 36,000 premature deaths from air pollution on a monthly basis.

Keywords: COVID-19; coronavirus; PM2.5; lockdown; health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I15 I18 Q52 Q53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2020-03, Revised 2020-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-ene, nep-env and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
https://iems.ust.hk/assets/publications/working-papers-2020/iemswp2020-72.pdf First version, 2020 (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:hku:wpaper:202072

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in HKUST IEMS Working Paper Series from HKUST Institute for Emerging Market Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Carla Chan ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).