How does pollutant emission in waste gas impact on human mortality rates in Chinese geographical provinces level?

Abstract

This paper mainly describes and tests how some pollutant emissions in waste gas, sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxides (NO x ), and smoke and dust impact mortality rates in Chinese geographical provinces level, respectively. The first finding is that some geographically distributional characteristics about these pollutant emissions in China, such as regions in northern China, have higher emission than provinces in southern China. Additionally, the difference of mortality rates in regions in China province level is relatively large but has vaguely distributional characteristics. Based on the results of empirical tests, we find that these three main pollutant emissions in waste gas don not have significant effect on mortality rates. The partial effect estimation for mortality rates, some population characteristics and health situation could produce significant impact, such as life expectancy and per capita health expenditure. Even though environmental factors are considered solely in empirical tests, only the quantity of SO2 is significantly positive correlation with mortality rates, and the effect is also very small. Hence, the effect of pollutant emission in waste gas on mortality rates is not obvious. In other word, the death risk with pollutant emission in waste gas is relatively small.