The Impact of the Wuhan Covid-19 lockdown on air pollution and health: a machine learning and augmented synthetic control approach

Matthew A. Cole, Robert J. R. Elliott*, Bowen Liu

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

16 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

We quantify the impact of the Wuhan Covid-19 lockdown on concentrations of four air pollutants using a two-step approach. First, we use machine learning to remove the confounding effects of weather conditions on pollution concentrations. Second, we use a new augmented synthetic control method (Ben-Michael et al. in The augmented synthetic control method. University of California Berkeley, Mimeo, 2019. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.04170.pdf) to estimate the impact of the lockdown on weather normalised pollution relative to a control group of cities that were not in lockdown. We find NO2 concentrations fell by as much as 24 μ g/m3 during the lockdown (a reduction of 63% from the pre-lockdown level), while PM10 concentrations fell by a similar amount but for a shorter period. The lockdown had no discernible impact on concentrations of SO2 or CO. We calculate that the reduction of NO2 concentrations could have prevented as many as 496 deaths in Wuhan city, 3368 deaths in Hubei province and 10,822 deaths in China as a whole.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)553-580
Number of pages28
JournalEnvironmental and Resource Economics
Volume76
Issue number4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 10 Aug 2020

Bibliographical note

© Springer Nature B.V. 2020

Keywords

  • Air pollution
  • Covid-19
  • Health
  • Machine learning
  • Synthetic control

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Economics and Econometrics
  • Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

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