 The Morbidity Cost of Air Pollution: Evidence from Consumer Spending in ChinaPanle Barwick (), Shanjun Li, Deyu Rao and Nahim Bin Zahur Working Papers from eSocialSciences Abstract: This paper provides knowledge the first analysis of the morbidity cost of PM2.5 for the entire population of a developing country. To address potential endogeneity in pollution exposure, it constructs an instrumental variable by modeling the spatial spillovers of PM2.5 due to long-range transport. It proposes a flexible distributed-lag model that incorporates the IV approach to capture the dynamic response to past pollution exposure. The analysis shows that PM2.5 has a significant impact on healthcare spending in both the short and medium terms that survives an array of robustness checks. The annual reduction in national healthcare spending from complying with the World Health Organization’s annual standard of 10 mg/m3 would amount to $42 billion, or nearly 7% of China’s total healthcare spending in 2015. In contrast to the common perception that the morbidity impact is modest relative to the mortality impact, our estimated morbidity cost of air pollution is about two-thirds of the mortality cost from the recent literature. Keywords: eSS; knowledge; World Health Organization (WHO; morbidity cost; pollution exposure; instrumental; variables; population; health care spending; national health casre spending; mortality; 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:ess:wpaper:id:12825 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from eSocialSciences |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.