Empirical Research On Environmental And Health

With the improvement of people's living standards,a series of problems caused by environmental pollution were brought to the stage,leading to a lot of bothering in daily life.Moreover,the continuous upgrading of industrialization and the vigorous development of urbanization also turn out that the environmental problems are increasingly prominent.As a by-product of human civilization,water pollution and air pollution are not only damaging people's life as well as health,but also negatively affecting the implementation of sustainable development blueprint in China.Apparently,the environmental quality is inextricably related to our daily life,for the reason that it affects people's physical conditions.More importantly,it also affects the overall quality of public life.For instance,it is reported that the health problem such as obesity is becoming more and more prominent,and the incident rate of obesity in China rises continuously.Therefore,it is no doubt that air pollution and obesity are serious problems that we are faced with today.However,there are not many micro studies on the impact of air pollution on individual health,and among which the research on air pollution on the obesity of residents is even much less.Based on the panel data of Chinese Family Panel Studies(CFPS)in 2010,2012,and 2014,this paper studies and analyses the effect of air pollution on obesity of residents through a fixed-effect model.Firstly,the study matched the locations of air pollution monitoring sites with the location data of the individuals from the CFPS directly according to the information of districts and counties,in order to obtain the individual residents' perception of air pollution.Then the IDW method was used to match the location of the meteorological stations as well as the location of the individual in the CFPS to keep control of the weather conditions.Besides,the individual differences were controlled by variables like age and years of education.Finally,the regression model was used to analyze the fixed effect of air pollution on residents' obesity incident rates through panel data.Furthermore,all the data was divided into gender,educational level,urban or rural residence,regional and occupational differences for heterogeneity analysis.In addition,using theoretical and empirical analysis,the study clarified the specific influence mechanism of air pollution on obesity.The main findings of the study are as follows.Firstly,air pollution has a significant positive impact on the BMI of residents.Further research found that the impact of air pollution on the proportion of overweight and obese people was significantly positive.Moreover,data from six months before the survey and two years before the survey showed that the more serious air pollution was,the higher the proportion of overweight and obese people would be.Secondly,air pollution also has a significant impact on BMI as well as the proportion of overweight and obese people of male and female,high and low education,urban and rural residents.In terms of the regional regression,it found that air pollution has the most significant impact on the BMI and proportion of overweight people in North,East,and Central China.Besides,the impact on the proportion of obese people in North China is the most significant.In terms of the different occupational groups with different strengths of manual labor,air pollution has a significant impact on the proportion of overweight people as well as the proportion of obese people of occupational groups with strong manual labor.Thirdly,through the review of the existing literature,it has been found that there are many ways for air pollution to affect human obesity.For example,in terms of biochemical mechanisms,air pollution could change body metabolism that was closely related to weight,and it could also increase the risk of chronic diseases,etc.And in terms of behavioral mechanisms,air pollution could negatively affect the frequency of outdoor exercise,and could disturb people's normal physical labor,etc.