| Abstract: |
The new Coronavirus pandemic has extensive negative socioeconomic impacts.
However, its effects on climate change and in particular air pollution, at
least at the beginning of the outbreak, is not clear. Fear of getting the
Coronavirus in crowded public spaces increased the use of personal cars, while
prevention policies that seek to decrease population movement reduced their
usage. This paper investigates the relationship between the outbreak of
COVID-19, measured by the number of infected cases, and air pollution,
measured by PM2.5, in 31 Iranian provinces over the 19 February 2020 to 11
March 2020 period. We employ a panel vector autoregressive (PVAR) approach
along with impulse response functions (IRFs), variance decomposition, and
Granger causality tests. The analysis shows negative responses of the PM
pollution to positive shock in COVID-19 cases in Iran. |