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The Impact of the Wuhan Covid-19 Lockdown on Air Pollution and Health: A Machine Learning and Augmented Synthetic Control Approach.
- Source :
- Environmental & Resource Economics; Aug2020, Vol. 76 Issue 4, p553-580, 28p
- Publication Year :
- 2020
-
Abstract
- We quantify the impact of the Wuhan Covid-19 lockdown on concentrations of four air pollutants using a two-step approach. First, we use machine learning to remove the confounding effects of weather conditions on pollution concentrations. Second, we use a new augmented synthetic control method (Ben-Michael et al. in The augmented synthetic control method. University of California Berkeley, Mimeo, 2019. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.04170.pdf) to estimate the impact of the lockdown on weather normalised pollution relative to a control group of cities that were not in lockdown. We find NO 2 concentrations fell by as much as 24 μ g/m 3 during the lockdown (a reduction of 63% from the pre-lockdown level), while PM10 concentrations fell by a similar amount but for a shorter period. The lockdown had no discernible impact on concentrations of SO 2 or CO. We calculate that the reduction of NO 2 concentrations could have prevented as many as 496 deaths in Wuhan city, 3368 deaths in Hubei province and 10,822 deaths in China as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 09246460
- Volume :
- 76
- Issue :
- 4
- Database :
- Complementary Index
- Journal :
- Environmental & Resource Economics
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 145405579
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-020-00483-4