Abstract
Abstract. Serious haze can cause contaminant diseases that trigger productive labour time by raising mortality and morbidity rates in cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. Health studies rarely consider macroeconomic impacts of industrial interlinkages while disaster studies seldom involve air pollution and its health consequences. This study adopts a supply-driven input–output model to estimate the economic loss resulted from disease-induced working-time reduction across 30 Chinese provinces in 2012 using the most updated Chinese multiregional input–output table. Results show a total economic loss of CNY 398.23 billion ( ∼ 1 % of China's GDP in 2012), with the majority coming from Eastern China and the Mid-South. The total number of affected labourers amounts to 82.19 million. Cross-regional economic impact analysis indicates that the Mid-South, North China, and Eastern China entail the majority of the regional indirect loss. Indeed, most indirect loss in North China, the Northwest and the Southwest can be attributed to manufacturing and energy in other regions, while loss in Eastern China, the Mid-South and the Northeast largely originate from coal and mining in other regions. At the subindustrial level, most inner-regional loss in North China and the Northwest originate from coal and mining, in Eastern China and Southwest from equipment and energy, and in the Mid-South from metal and non-metal. These findings highlight the potential role of geographical distance in regional interlinkages and regional heterogeneity in inner- and outer-regional loss due to distinctive regional economic structures and dependences between the north and south.
Highlights
Millions of people in China are currently breathing a toxic cocktail of chemicals, which has become one of the most serious environmental issues in China resulting in widespread environmental and health problems (Meng et al, 2015, 2016a), including increasing risks for heart and respiratory diseases, stroke, and lung cancer
The relative risks for PM2.5-induced mortality (ischemic heart disease (IHD), stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and LC), hospital admissions, and outpatient visits were estimated using an integrated exposure–response (IER) model based on which population attributable fraction (PAF) can be calculated to estimate counts of PM2.5-induced deaths, admissions, and outpatient visits
Reductions in industrial value added served as an input in the supply-driven input–output (IO) model to measure the total indirect economic loss incurred along the production supply chain, which is measured as the total loss in output level
Summary
Millions of people in China are currently breathing a toxic cocktail of chemicals, which has become one of the most serious environmental issues in China resulting in widespread environmental and health problems (Meng et al, 2015, 2016a), including increasing risks for heart and respiratory diseases, stroke, and lung cancer. Inspired by our previous work on the socioeconomic impacts of China’s air pollution in 2007 (Xia et al, 2016), this paper applies a similar approach to China’s air pollution in 2012 and examines the crossregional economic impacts in order to underline the important role of indirect economic loss for the year 2012. In other words, it aims to investigate the overall economic loss resulting from health-induced labour time reduction among all Chinese labourers for year of 2012. Future policymakers and researchers could obtain an alternative macroeconomic tool to better conduct cost-benefit analysis for any environmental or climate change related policy design, and to comprehend health cost studies in its macroeconomic side
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