Ambiguous Pollution Response to COVID-19 in China

Douglas Almond, Xinming Du and Shuang Zhang

No 27086, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Reductions in ambient pollution have been taken as an indisputable "silver lining" to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Indeed, worldwide economic contraction induced by COVID-19 lockdowns should generate global air quality improvements ceteris paribus, including to China's notoriously-poor air quality. We analyze China's official pollution monitor data and account for the large, recurrent improvement in air quality following Lunar New Year (LNY), which essentially coincided with lock-downs in 2020. With the important exception of NO2, China's air quality improvements in 2020 are smaller than we should expect near the pandemic's epicenter: Hubei province. Compared with LNY improvements experienced in 2018 and 2019 in Hubei, we see smaller improvements in SO2 while ozone concentrations increased in both relative and absolute terms (roughly doubling). Similar patterns are found for the six provinces neighboring Hubei. We conclude that COVID-19 had ambiguous impacts on China's pollution, with evidence of relative deterioration in air quality near the Pandemic's epicenter.

JEL-codes: I1 Q53 Q56 Z18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-ene and nep-env
Note: EEE EH
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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