An environmentally related policy impact analysis considering wind effect: evidence from suspending old coal-fired generators in South Korea

Donggyu Yi and Jae-Hoon Sung

Applied Economics Letters, 2023, vol. 30, issue 5, 626-634

Abstract: This study measures the causal effect of an individual, aged coal-fired generator on PM2.5 concentration. For this, the policy of shutting down old coal-fired power plants in Korea as a quasi-natural experiment was examined. This study adopts the difference-in-differences technique and controls both for wind effects and overseas pollutant effects. The results show that the shut-down policy reduces daily PM2.5 concentration by 2.04–3.65 μg/m3 across the number of generators suspended, and the share of wind effects in the total policy effects is estimated as about 50%. In addition, overseas effects account for about 20% (5.64 μg/m3) of regional PM2.5 concentration on average. These results imply that although the closure of old coal-fired power plants can reduce average PM2.5 concentration, the policy alone is not enough to expect a remarkable improvement in air quality when PM2.5 concentration is high. Thus, these findings suggest that the Korean government must consider domestic policies and cross-border cooperative policies to resolve the high PM2.5 concentration issue.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13504851.2021.2005765 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:apeclt:v:30:y:2023:i:5:p:626-634

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEL20

DOI: 10.1080/13504851.2021.2005765

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics Letters is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics Letters from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().