Winter Heating or Clean Air? Unintended Impacts of China's Huai River Policy
Author(s)
Almond, Douglas; Chen, Yuyu; Greenstone, Michael; Li, Hongbin
DownloadWinter Heating or Clean Air ACGL 010809 (sent to AER P&P).pdf (331.8Kb)
PUBLISHER_POLICY
Publisher Policy
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Terms of use
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
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).
Date issued
2009-05Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of EconomicsJournal
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
ISSN
0002-8282