Does Stringency of Lockdown Affect Air Quality? Evidence from Indian Cities

Surender Kumar and Shunsuke Managi

Economics of Disasters and Climate Change, 2020, vol. 4, issue 3, No 4, 502 pages

Abstract: Abstract The precipitous spread of COVID-19 has created a conflict between human health and economic well-being. To contain the spread of its contagious effect, India imposed a stringent lockdown, and then the stringency was relaxed to some extent in its succeeding phases. We measure social benefits of the lockdown in terms of improved air quality in Indian cities by quantifying the effects with city-specific slope coefficients. We find that the containment measures have resulted in improvement in air quality, but it is not uniform across cities and across pollutants. The level of PM2.5 decreases from about 6 to 25% in many cities. Moreover, we observe that partial relaxations do not help in resuming economic and social activities. It should also be noted that counter-virus measures could not bring levels of the emissions to WHO standards; it highlights the importance of role of green production and consumption activities.

Keywords: COVID-19; Lockdown; Air pollution; India; City (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I15 I18 Q52 Q53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s41885-020-00072-1 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
Working Paper: Does stringency of lockdown affect air quality? Evidence from Indian cities (2020)
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:spr:ediscc:v:4:y:2020:i:3:d:10.1007_s41885-020-00072-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer ... mental/journal/41885

DOI: 10.1007/s41885-020-00072-1

Access Statistics for this article

Economics of Disasters and Climate Change is currently edited by Ilan Noy and Shunsuke Managi

More articles in Economics of Disasters and Climate Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().