Understanding government pollution control actions and well-being: Evidence from micro individuals

Abstract

The Chinese government took many measures to improve air quality in recent years, and the Atmosphere Ten Articles Plan (ATAP) was one of the most significant air pollution control policies. We used the staggered difference-in-differences method to determine the causal link between air quality improvement and people's subjective well-being (SWB) by utilizing the quasi-natural experiment of different Chinese cities implementing the ATAP. We found that ATAP implementations significantly improved people’s SWB, as supported by multiple robustness tests, such as excluding spillover effects and self-selection effects and placebo tests. Moreover, potential mechanisms by which ATAP implementations affected people’s SWB included improving physical and mental health status, alleviating emotional problems, reducing insomnia, and promoting exercise and outdoor activities. Furthermore, heterogeneity effect results suggested that ATAP implementations were more beneficial to some socially vulnerable groups and this SWB improvement effect was greater for residents living in urban areas. These findings added to the body of literature on how environmental policies affect people's welfare and had important implications for better air quality improvement policies in China and other developing countries.