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METHODS DEVELOPMENT FOR ASSESSING AIR POLLUTION CONTROL BENEFITS. VOLUME I. EXPERIMENTS IN THE ECONOMICS OF AIR POLLUTION EPIDEMIOLOGY
Citation:
Crocker, T., W. Schulze, S. Ben-David, AND A. Kneese. METHODS DEVELOPMENT FOR ASSESSING AIR POLLUTION CONTROL BENEFITS. VOLUME I. EXPERIMENTS IN THE ECONOMICS OF AIR POLLUTION EPIDEMIOLOGY. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, D.C., EPA/600/5-79/001A.
Description:
The volume employs the analytical and empirical methods of economics to develop hypotheses on disease etiologies and to value labor productivity and consumer losses due to air pollution-induced mortality and morbidity. In the mortality work, 1970 city-wide mortality rates for major disease catagories have been statistically associated with aggregate data from sixty U.S. cities on physicians per capita, per capita cigarette consumption, dietary habits, air pollution and other factors. The estimated effect of air pollution on mortality rates is about an order of magnitude lower than some other estimates. Nevertheless, rather small but important associations are found between pneumonia and bronchitis and particulates in air and between early infant disease and sulfur dioxide air pollution. The morbidity work employed data on the generalized health states and the time and budget allocations of a nationwide sample of individual heads of household. For the bulk of the dose-response expressions estimated, air pollution appears to be significantly associated with increased time being spent acutely or chronically ill. Air pollution, in addition, appears to influence labor productivity, where the reduction in productivity is measured by the earnings lost due to reductions in worktime.