Does the Effect of Pollution on Infant Mortality Differ Between Developing and Developed Countries? Evidence from Mexico City

Abstract

Much of what we know about the marginal effect of pollution on infant mortality is derived from developed country data. However, given the lower levels of air pollution in developed countries, these estimates may not be externally valid to the developing country context if there is a nonlinear dose relationship between pollution and mortality or if the costs of avoidance behavior differs considerably between the two contexts. In this paper, we estimate the relationship between pollution and infant mortality using data from Mexico. We find that an increase of 1 parts per billion in carbon monoxide (CO) over the last week results in 0.0032 deaths per 100,000 births, while a 1 µg/m 3 increase in particulate matter (PM 10 ) results in 0.24 infant deaths per 100,000 births. Our estimates for PM 10 tend to be similar (or even smaller) than the U.S. estimates, while our findings on CO tend to be larger than those derived from the U.S. context. We provide suggestive evidence that a non-linearity in the relationship between CO and health explains this difference.

Air Pollution and Infant Mortality: Evidence from the Expansion of Natural Gas Infrastructure

“…Another possibility is that the improvements in air quality might lead to a reduction in the number of stillbirths and miscarriages, which would then result in an increase in the number of live births. We test this hypothesis by estimating our models with the logarithm of infant deaths as the dependent variable and the logarithm of births as an additional control variable (Arceo-Gomez, Hanna, and Oliva, 2012). As presented in Panel A of Table 5, performing this test yields estimates that are largely consistent with those in Table 4B when province fixed effects, province-specific linear and quadratic time trends and region-by-year fixed-effects are specified.…”

“…Despite growing concerns about the harmful health impacts of air pollution in developing countries, most of the available evidence on the subject comes from the United States and a few other developed countries (e.g., Chay and Greenstone, 2003a, b;Currie and Neidell, 2005;Currie, Neidell, and Schmieder, 2009;Currie and Walker, 2011;Currie, Greenstone, and Moretti, 2011;Knittel, Miller, and Sanders, 2011). 5 One explanation for the relative paucity of evidence from developing countries is the fact that policy changes and environmental regulations in the developing world are rare and weakly enforced, failing to generate enough variation in air pollution levels to detect statistically significant effects (Arceo-Gomez, Hanna, and Oliva, 2012;Tanaka, 2012). In the absence of exogenous sources of variation, the associations obtained in much of the earlier research on air pollution and health may reflect the impact of omitted factors, such as socio-economic status, that are correlated with both pollution exposure and health outcomes rather than the impact of air pollution per se.…”

Envirodevonomics: A Research Agenda for a Young Field

“…She uses satellite aerosol monitoring data to show that the particulate matter emitted by the fires led to a reduction in the size of the exposed birth cohort by 1.2 percent, an effect that is largely explained by pre-natal exposure. A recent study by Arceo, Hanna and Oliva (2012) finds that exposure to carbon monoxide and particulate matter increases infant mortality in Mexico City. They use the frequency of thermal inversions, which trap pollutants close to the ground, as a source of plausibly exogenous variation in pollution exposure.…”

Dust and Death: Evidence from the West African Harmattan

“…of pollution exposure in the developing world (Arceo-Gomez et al, 2016;Ebenstein, 2012;Ebenstein et al, 2017;Greenstone and Hanna, 2014;Heft-Neal et al, 2018;Jayachandran, 2009). 4 Our data, across many West African countries and spanning two decades, allow us to expand the external validity of existing findings.…”

“…In other cases, diminishing mortality has not been due to better mitigation, but rather to improved air quality (Arceo-Gomez et al, 2016). As Arceo-Gomez et al (2016) note, the effects of pollution may be more severe at the higher levels found in poor countries, and the costs of avoidance behavior may be greater. This is true of many types of environmental shocks to health (Burgess et al, 2014;Dell et al, 2014;Kudamatsu et al, 2012).…”