Is China's Pollution the Culprit for the Choking of South Korea? Evidence from the Asian Dust

Abstract

This paper studies the impact of air pollution spillover from China to South Korea. To isolate the effects of cross-border pollution spillover from that of locally generated pollution, we exploit within-South Korea and over-time variation in the incidence of Asian dust—a meteorological phenomenon exogenous to district–time cells in South Korea—together with temporal variations in China's air quality. We find that conditional on being exposed to Asian dust, increased pollution in China leads to increased mortality from respiratory and cardiovascular diseases in South Korean districts, with the most vulnerable being the elderly and children under five.

Mitigating the Air Pollution Effect? The Remarkable Decline in the Pollution-Mortality Relationship in Hong Kong

“…As pollution from mainland China creates quasi-random shocks to HK's local air quality, we utilize this transboundary pollution to identify the air pollution effect. The identification strategy is similar in spirit to Anderson (2015), Jia and Ku (2018), and Deryugina et al (2019). Anderson (2015) and Deryugina et al (2019) compare the population groups living downwind and upwind and estimate the effects of air pollution exposure on the population mortality and health cost of the elderly in the United States.…”

“…Anderson (2015) and Deryugina et al (2019) compare the population groups living downwind and upwind and estimate the effects of air pollution exposure on the population mortality and health cost of the elderly in the United States. Jia and Ku (2018) assess the impact of cross-border air pollution from China to South Korea and find that "yellow dust" (sand) blowing in from China leads to extra deaths in South Korea.…”

Chinese Yellow Dust and Korean infant health

“…The authors show that during the months in which Chinese pollution is high, an increase in the number of yellow dust events triggers a rise in deaths due to respiratory and cardiovascular causes, especially in the elderly population in Korean districts. Our paper is different from Jia and Ku (2015) in a number of ways. First, we focus on infant birth outcomes, rather than aggregate mortality.…”

“…5 Our paper is the first one to investigate the effectiveness of public air quality alerts on birth outcomes. 6 In a concurrent paper, using the incidence of yellow dust events in Korea, Jia and Ku (2015) investigate the effect of pollution on mortality. The authors show that during the months in which Chinese pollution is high, an increase in the number of yellow dust events triggers a rise in deaths due to respiratory and cardiovascular causes, especially in the elderly population in Korean districts.…”

“…Second, we employ micro data, as opposed to district-level data. Finally, Jia and Ku (2015) consider neither the avoidance behavior of Koreans nor the public alerts against poor air quality.…”