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The effect of emission trading system on infant health: evidence from China

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Abstract

Although existing literature has explored the effect of the emission trading system (ETS) on economic growth and pollution emissions, little is known about the impact of the ETS on residents’ heath, especially infant health. Based on a “big sample” data set from 1773 county-level administrative regions in China from 2001 to 2012 and a differences-in-differences (DID) strategy, for the first time, this paper investigates the effect of China’s SO2 ETS pilot policy on infant health measured by infant mortality. In particular, from the perspectives of pollution emission reduction and green and high-quality economic growth, we empirically identify the mechanism through which the ETS influences infant mortality. The results show that the implementation of the ETS pilot policy significantly reduces infant mortality, and with the implementation of the pilot policy, such a health improvement effect is strengthened. This finding is consolidated through a series of robustness checks, including employing the method of the propensity score matching combined by the DID, using the thermal inversion strength as the instrumental variable, excluding the impacts of other environmental policies, and conducting a placebo test. In addition, the results of the mechanism analysis indicate that the ETS pilot policy significantly lowers SO2 emission density and PM2.5 concentration and raises energy efficiency and per capita GDP. Therefore, the ETS pilot policy can improve infant health by promoting pollution emission reduction and green and high-quality economic growth. This study provides some empirical evidence for the causal relationship between environmental regulation policies and infant health, as well as some reference for the formulation and improvement of related environmental regulation policies.

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Notes

  1. In this paper, by convention, the infant refers to children under 5 years old.

  2. See https://www.who.int/news/item/29-10-2018-more-than-90-of-the-worlds-children-breathe-toxic-air-every-day.

  3. See http://www.gov.cn/zhengce/content/2016-12/05/content_5143290.htm.

  4. Although China started the sulfur dioxide (SO2) emission trading system as early as 2001, the trading volume of early emission rights was zero, and thus the corresponding policy effects were slight. In December 2007, the Chinese government approved 11 provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities as pilot regions for emissions trading, and these pilots took practical actions. Since then, the scale and scope of SO2 emission trading have been obviously expanded, and trading activities have significantly increased.

  5. See http://www.gov.cn/zhengce/content/2014-08/25/content_9050.htm.

  6. Considering that the official document of the SO2 ETS pilot policy was issued at the end of 2007 and that the implementation of the policy had a time lag, following some previous studies (e.g., Shi and Li, 2020), we also set the year of 2008 as the starting point of the policy in this study.

  7. The data are collected from http://www.healthdata.org/gbd/2019.

  8. The NTL intensity of a county equals to the average value of digital numbers within the region. The original data is derived from the stable NTL images of the Operational Line-scan System of the Defense Meteorology Satellite Program (DMSP/OLS) released by the NOAA. Note that the digital numbers of regions’ core areas may be lower than the true values, because the scope of the digital number is limited to a range of 0–63 for the stable NTL images. Thus, following Zheng et al. (2019), we conduct a saturation correction by utilizing the radiation-calibrated NTL images issued by the NOAA. Then, according to the standard “three-step” method provided by Elvidge et al. (2009) and Liu et al. (2012), we further calibrate the NTL data to improve the accuracy and time comparability.

  9. The data are collected from http://www.healthdata.org/gbd/2019.

  10. See https://apps.ecmwf.int/datasets/data/interim-full-moda/levtype=sfc/.

  11. See http://inventory.pku.edu.cn/download/download.html.

  12. See http://fizz.phys.dal.ca/~atmos/martin/?page_id=140.

  13. See http://www.gov.cn/zhengce/content/2010-11/22/content_5181.htm.

  14. See http://www.mee.gov.cn/gkml/zj/wj/200910/t20091022_172141.htm.

  15. See https://zfxxgk.ndrc.gov.cn/web/iteminfo.jsp?id=1070.

  16. These three policy dummy variables, i.e., CZ, KCAPPC, and LCPC, are assigned to 1 for the countries belonging to the jurisdiction of the “Two Control Zones”, the key cities for air pollution prevention and control, and the first batch of low-carbon pilot cities, respectively, and otherwise 0.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 71773075, 71922015, and 72103125), the National Social Science Foundation of China (No. 21ZDA084), China Post-Doctoral Science Foundation (No. 2020M671062), Shanghai Philosophy and Social Science Fund Project (No. 2019BJB001), Shanghai Post-Doctoral Excellence Program, and Shanghai University of Finance and Economics Graduate Innovation Fund Project (CXJJ-2018-426).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Business, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, 200237, China

    Shuai Shao

  2. School of Urban and Regional Science, Institute of Finance and Economics Research, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, 200433, China

    Shuai Shao, Lili Xu & Meiting Fan

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  1. Shuai Shao
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  2. Lili Xu
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  3. Meiting Fan
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SS was involved in conceptualization; data curation; supervision; writing—original draft; LX contributed to methodology; data curation; formal analysis; visualization; writing—original draft; MF was involved in conceptualization; supervision; methodology; formal analysis; writing—review and editing.

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Correspondence to Meiting Fan.

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Shao, S., Xu, L. & Fan, M. The effect of emission trading system on infant health: evidence from China. Environ Geochem Health 44, 3021–3033 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10653-021-01173-w

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