Lecture | May 19, 2017/ 3:00-4:15 p.m. | Room 106B in JNU Zhonghui Building

Title: Heterogeneous Impacts of Air Pollution on Mortality in China: Evidence from County-Level Panel Data
Speaker: GONG Ya-zhen
Sponsor: Economic and Social Research Institute of Jinan University
Publisher: Social and Scientific Research Office

ABOUT GONG YA-ZHEN
Gong Ya-zhen, doctor, associate professor of College of the Environment in Renmin University of China. She graduated from University of British Columbia in Canada in 2010, and she continued in-service postdoctoral degree in UNESCO subordinate body IHE from 2012 to 2014. She was sent to the University of California in Berkeley for a year funded by the National Scholarship Foundation from August 2014 to August 2015. She was hired as a Research Associate at the University of California in Berkeley from September 2015 to September 2016. Since June 2016, she was a visiting professor at the Korea National Development Institute School. Since January 2017, he has been an editor of Regional Environmental Change, an international academic journal. Her major is Resource Economics, mainly using the micro-empirical methods and field experiments to study natural resource management and rural development of China's rural areas. Her research involves climate change, forest carbon sequestration, biodiversity, wetlands and irrigation water resources. The academic papers have been published in PNAS, Annual Review of Resource Economics, Ecological Economics, Agricultural Economics and Natural Resources Journal home and abroad. Since 2010, she has hosted the Natural Science Foundation project and a number of international cooperation projects. Meanwhile, she was also an important participant in several major national public welfare projects.

Abstract:
Understanding the health impacts of air pollution in China has important policy implications for environmental regulation and economic development such as understanding the potential health consequences of recent national plans that aim to reduce the economic gap across different regions but encouraging manufacturing activities to be relocated from the east coast to the west. To estimate the cost of air pollution in China, many studies including some conducted by the World Health Organization and the World Bank are still largely rely on previous research based on the U.S. data. This practice may yield implausible results as China is experiencing much higher pollution concentration than that in the US (Cropper, 2003). Despite an emerging body of research on the heath impacts of air pollution in China (e.g. Ebestein et al., 2015; Lu et al., 2015; Zhou et al., 2015; Chen et al., 2012; Matus et al., 2012), much remains to be improved and learned especially with regard to the causal identification, the heterogeneity of the effects among the population, and the shape of the dose-response function. Using a county-level panel data set on mortalities from respiratory and cardiovascular diseases from 2004 to 2010 by age groups and gender, this study examines the heterogeneous impacts of PM2.5 concentration across population groups and at different levels of concentration. To establish the causal relationship, we instrument for county air quality using variations in economic growth in the top five exporting destination countries for the corresponding county. We find large heterogeneity in health impacts across age groups and the dose-response function is estimated to be nonlinear.