| Abstract: |
One of the consequences of rapid economic growth and industrialization in the
developing world has been deterioration in environmental conditions and air
quality. While air pollution is a serious threat to health in most developing
countries, environmental regulations are rare and the determination to address
the problem is weak due to ongoing pressures to sustain robust economic
growth. Under these constraints, natural gas, as a clean, abundant, and
highly-efficient source of energy, has emerged as an increasingly attractive
source of fuel, which could address some of the environmental and health
challenges faced by these countries without undermining their economies. In
this paper, we examine the impact of air pollution on infant mortality in
Turkey using variation across provinces and over time in the adoption of
natural gas as a cleaner fuel. Our results indicate that the expansion of
natural gas infrastructure has caused a significant decrease in the rate of
infant mortality in Turkey. In particular, a one-percentage point increase in
the rate of subscriptions to natural gas services would cause the infant
mortality rate to decline by 4 percent, which could result in 348 infant lives
saved in 2011 alone. These results are robust to a large number of
specifications. Finally, we use supplemental data on total particulate matter
and sulfur dioxide to produce direct estimates of the effects of these
pollutants on infant mortality using natural gas expansion as an instrument.
Our elasticity estimates from the instrumental variable analysis are 1.25 for
particulate matter and 0.63 for sulfur dioxide. |