How does air quality affect residents' life satisfaction? Evidence based on multiperiod follow-up survey data of 122 cities in China.

Abstract

Since entering the new era, China's socialist contradiction has been transformed into the contradiction between the people's growing need for a better life and the unbalanced and inadequate development. How to improve the quality of people's life through the improvement of air quality has become an important content restricting social development and a key problem to be solved. Based on the life satisfaction (LS) method, this study takes air quality into the individual utility function, and through matching China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), two phases of microindividual tracking data with 122 urban environmental quality data innovatively investigate the impact of air quality on residents' LS and its income substitution effect. The results show that air quality significantly reduces residents' LS, among which, different air pollutants and comprehensive air quality AQI have significant negative effects. And PM10 has the highest marginal effect on different LS evaluation, SO2 has the smallest marginal effect, and AQI marginal effect is close to PM10. In terms of group heterogeneity, NO2 and SO2 have group influence differences in age group, regional economic group, gender group, and family per capita income group. But PM10 and AQI do not show group influence heterogeneity, and air quality has significant negative effect on LS of different groups. In addition, the interaction between air quality and income level shows that air quality strengthens the difference of residents' LS caused by income level difference. According to the equilibrium condition of residents' individual utility function, the improvement of air quality by 1% is equivalent to the improvement of residents' LS by 23.4402% of income. Firstly, air quality has an important impact on residents' LS, and different air pollutants have different effects. Secondly, the impact of air quality on LS of different groups is heterogeneous and mainly diversified in age group, regional economic group, gender group, and family per capital income group. Finally, there is substitution effect between air quality and regional GDP growth and household income, which affects residents' LS. Thirdly, the conclusion shows that the improvement of air quality is difficult to be replaced by other ways. Good air quality can not only directly improve residents' LS, but also has economic effect.