Does the Effect of Pollution on Infant Mortality Differ Between Developing and Developed Countries? Evidence from Mexico City
Rema Hanna,
Eva Arceo-Gomez and
Paulina Oliva (olivaval@usc.edu)
No 244, CID Working Papers from Center for International Development at Harvard University
Abstract:
Much of what we know about the marginal effect of pollution on infant mortality is derived from developed country data. However, given the lower levels of air pollution in developed countries, these estimates may not be externally valid to the developing country context if there is a nonlinear dose relationship between pollution and mortality or if the costs of avoidance behavior differs considerably between the two contexts. In this paper, we estimate the relationship between pollution and infant mortality using data from Mexico. We find that an increase of 1 parts per billion in carbon monoxide (CO) over the last week results in 0.0032 deaths per 100,000 births, while a 1 μg/m3 increase in particulate matter (PM10) results in 0.24 infant deaths per 100,000 births. Our estimates for PM10 tend to be similar (or even smaller) than the U.S. estimates, while our findings on CO tend to be larger than those derived from the U.S. context. We provide suggestive evidence that a non-linearity in the relationship between CO and health explains this difference.
Keywords: Pollution; Infant Mortality; Mexico; Health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I15 O1 Q53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-06
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (44)
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/ce ... 4_Hanna_June2012.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Journal Article: Does the Effect of Pollution on Infant Mortality Differ Between Developing and Developed Countries? Evidence from Mexico City (2016) 
Working Paper: Does the Effect of Pollution on Infant Mortality Differ between Developing and Developed Countries? Evidence from Mexico City (2012) 
Working Paper: Does the Effect of Pollution on Infant Mortality Differ Between Developing and Developed Countries? Evidence from Mexico City (2012) 
Working Paper: Does the Effect of Pollution on Infant Mortality Differ Between Developing and Developed Countries? Evidence from Mexico City (2012) 
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:cid:wpfacu:244
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in CID Working Papers from Center for International Development at Harvard University 79 John F. Kennedy Street. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chuck McKenney (chuck_mckenney@hks.harvard.edu).