Winter Heating or Clean Air? Unintended Impacts of China's Huai River Policy
Name
Winter Heating or Clean Air ACGL 010809 (sent to AER P&P).pdf
Size
331.82 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
06319783e55bdc51c1ef4d72662cd6e5
Author(s)
Almond, Douglas
Chen, Yuyu
Greenstone, Michael
Li, Hongbin
Date Issued
May 2009
Journal
American Economic Review
Publisher
American Economic Association
Citation
Almond, Douglas, Yuyu Chen, Michael Greenstone, and Hongbin Li. 2009. "Winter Heating or Clean Air? Unintended Impacts of China's Huai River Policy." American Economic Review, 99(2): 184–90.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Air quality in China is notoriously poor. Ambient concentrations of Total Suspended Particulates (TSP) 1981-1993 were more than double China’s National Annual Mean Ambient Air Quality Standard of 200 mg/m-3 (Xiaohui Bi et al., 2007) and five times the level that prevailed in the U.S. before passage of the Clean Air Act in 1970. Further, it is frequently claimed that air quality is especially poor in northern Chinese cites. For example, following a career in the southern city of Shanghai, Prime Minister Zhu Rongi quipped in 1999: “If I work in your Beijing [in northern China], I would shorten my life at least five years” (The Economist, 2004, pp. 55-57).
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics
Terms of Use
Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/aer.99.2.184
