Journal article

Changing Population Exposure to Pollution in China's Special Economic Zones

Leslie A Martin, Katie Zhang

AEA PAPERS AND PROCEEDINGS | AMER ECONOMIC ASSOC | Published : 2021

Abstract

Martin and Zhang (2020) show that the increase in manufacturing output in China's special economic zones significantly increased air pollution. In this complementary paper, we document that widespread migration into these industrial clusters between 2000 and 2010 did little to change overall population exposure to pollution. We show using satellite air pollution data that there is much heterogeneity across zones and that most population growth occurred in relatively cleaner zones, supporting recent literature that documents local willingness to make location decisions based on environmental quality (Chen et al. 2019, Khanna et al. 2020).

University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Awarded by Australian Research Council


Funding Acknowledgements

The authors thank Yang Fan Xia and Quoc Anh Nguyen for related work on this project and John de New and Matthew Kahn for helpful comments. Leslie Martin acknowledges financial support from the Australian Research Council through the Discovery Early Career Research Award DE190101167.