The relationship between air quality, wealth, and COVID-19 diffusion and mortality across countries

Roberto Antonietti, Paolo Falbo and Fulvio Fontini
Additional contact information
Paolo Falbo: Department of Economics, University of Brescia, Italy

No 820, SEEDS Working Papers from SEEDS, Sustainability Environmental Economics and Dynamics Studies

Abstract: This study concerns the relationship between economic wealth, air quality and COVID-19 diffusion and mortality around the world. We show that the level of air quality, in terms of particulate (PM 2.5) concentrations, does not significantly contribute to explaining the diffusion of COVID-19 and the related mortality after accounting for socioeconomic factors, especially per capita GDP. This latter variable significantly correlates with the diffusion of COVID-10 and related mortality, and the result holds for different times when COVID-19 infections and deaths are counted. When we cluster countries by level of wealth, economic openness, macroeconomic structure, CO2 emissions, and climate conditions, we find that higher concentrations of PM 2.5 coincide with more infections and deaths, but only holds in high-income countries.

Keywords: COVID-19; pollution; PM2.5; wealth; cross-country analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 Q50 Q53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2020-05, Revised 2020-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env and nep-hea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sustainability-seeds.org/papers/RePec/srt/wpaper/0820.pdf First version, 2020 (application/pdf)
http://www.sustainability-seeds.org/papers/RePec/srt/wpaper/0820.pdf Revised version, 2020 (application/pdf)

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:srt:wpaper:0820

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SEEDS Working Papers from SEEDS, Sustainability Environmental Economics and Dynamics Studies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alessandro Palma ().