 Beyond particulate matter: New evidence on the causal effects of air pollution on mortalityMaoyong Fan, Hanchen Jiang and Maigeng Zhou Journal of Health Economics, 2023, vol. 91, issue C Abstract: The increasing demand for electricity worldwide has caused a corresponding rise in the consumption of coal, leading to an increase in sulfur dioxide (SO2) pollution levels. Despite the severity of the issue, there is a lack of conclusive evidence establishing a causal link between SO2 pollution and health, particularly in developing countries. We leverage a large national environmental regulation policy, implemented in China to reduce SO2 emissions, to estimate the impacts of SO2 pollution on mortality. We find that 1-μg/m3 reduction in SO2 concentrations leads to 18 fewer cardiovascular deaths per 100,000 people aged 60 years and above (0.9% decrease) and 2 fewer deaths per 100,000 children under the age of 5 (1.5% decrease) annually. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the total health benefits of the environmental policy outweigh its economic costs. The results are consistent across various robustness checks. Keywords: Sulfur dioxide (SO2) pollution; Air pollution; Mortality; Environmental regulation; Two-Control-Zone; China (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jhecon:v:91:y:2023:i:c:s0167629623000760 DOI: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2023.102799 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J. P. Newhouse, A. J. Culyer, R. Frank, K. Claxton and T. McGuire More articles in Journal of Health Economics from Elsevier |
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