The Harm Of Air Pollution On Public Health

Since the 1980s, China’s economy maintained a rapid growth, industrialization and urbanization greatly accelerated, GNP moved up, socialist economic construction also has made remarkable achievements. Economy’s rapid development not only brought superiors but also brought the consequences of excessive resource consumption and environment’s gradually deteriorated. Many environmental pollution index in China have inferior to international average standard, the environmental pollution caused by the "high pollution, high consumption, high emission" way of extensive economic growth has become a major problem hindering economy’s further development in our country. Environmental pollution especially air pollution brings serious damage to health of residents in our country. In recent years, air pollution incidents occurred frequently, they all endangers people’s health from different extent, and threaten the harmonious development of society. At this stage, our government has aware of the bad results of environmental pollution, pay more and more attention to environmental factors in policy, and commit to realize "environment-friendly society". However, the harsh environment present situation can not be changed rapidly, the severe environment situation still has profound negative impacts on people’s health.Many domestic and foreign medical literature have confirmed that air pollution have negative effects on human health, and it has positive correlation property with the incidents of respiratory disease, heart disease, disease of blood-vessel in head and perinatal death rate. There are many different kinds of atmospheric pollutants, according to the state, composition, source of pollutants and other standards, it can be divided into many different kinds. In many pollution factors, according to the conclusion of existing medical literature, we chose the sulfur dioxide as the main pollutant which threatening human health, namely key variable, and chose the proportion of respiratory system disease deaths as the human health indicators, and select the proportion of smokers, the number of physicians in ten thousand people, the government health expenditure and town worker medical insurance rate as control variable.This paper based on provincial panel data, and firstly uses the OLS estimation model, draw these conclusions:on each square kilometers of land, every tons of sulfur dioxide emissions will cause respiratory system disease death proportion rises 0.027%; smoker proportion rise one percent, the explained variable will rise 0.42 percent; the number of practicing doctors in ten thousand people increase one person, the explained variable will reduce 0.87 percent; the government expend of medical and health on every resident increase one RMB and the health insurance rate for urban employees increase one percent, the explained variable respectively will reduce 0.00013 percent and 0.00012 percent. The above variables all pass the test of significance.Then we consider the data endogenous problem of sulfur dioxide emission caused by objective and subjective factors, the endogenous problem man lead to inconsistent estimates, To solve this problem, this paper adopts the coal consumption as the tool variable of sulfur dioxide emissions variables, using 2SLS to modify the model, in the first stage, we use coal consumption to estimate sulfur dioxide emissions, draw the conclusions:on per square kilometers land, coal consumption increase one ton, emissions of sulfur dioxide in the air will accordingly increase by 0.01017 tons, and the fit of the model is very high, t test is significant, there exists no problem of weak explanatory variables. Then conduct the second stage regression, we use the sulfur dioxide estimates of the first stage instead of the original data to estimate the model, draw the following conclusions:After dealing with the instrumental variable, on each square kilometers land, every ton of sulfur dioxide emissions will lead to respiratory system disease death toll rate rises 0.041%; smokers proportion rise one percent, the respiratory system disease death toll rate can increase 0.42%. the number of practicing doctors in ten thousand people, government health care spending on per capita and the health and medical insurance rate of urban employees play a negative role to explained variables:the number of practicing doctors in ten thousand people increase one person, government spending on health care career increase one RMB per capita, rate of urban employees’ medical insurance increase by one percent, can respectively reduce respiratory system disease death ratio 0.84%,0.00013%,0.00012%. Thus, sulfur dioxide emissions is indeed significantly harm to the health of residents, and integrate two regression results, this paper holds that the emissions of sulfur dioxide with high proportion of smokers, common increase the death rate of respiratory diseases, and improving the medical insurance rate of urban workers, increasing government spending on medical and health undertaking, adding the number of practicing doctors can reduce the respiratory system disease mortality rate. And compare the two regression results can be found that compared with the indirect data of sulfur dioxide after estimating with coal consumption, direct data of sulfur dioxide emissions data will underestimate the harm to human health by about 34%.Combine with estimation results, concrete suggestions are given to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions, control the mining of sulfur coal mine, develop and utilize new energy, and strengthen the construction of basic medical facilities, in order to improve air quality, reduce the respiratory system disease mortality and optimize the environment for the residents, finally promote the construction of harmonious society.