The Impact of Industrial Pollution Exposure on Hospital Admissions: Evidence from a Cement Plant in Russia

Air pollution is Europe’s single largest environmental health risk. Several epidemiological and economic studies provide evidence of an association between ambient air pollution and human health, especially for children and elderly adults. Join the SITE Brown Bag seminar as Mariia Murasheva, a Researcher at the Nova School of Business and Economics (Nova SBE), discusses the paper “The Impact of Industrial Pollution Exposure on Hospital Admissions: Evidence from a Cement Plant in Russia”.

Abstract

This paper studies the effect of individual-level daily silicon dust (SiO2) exposure from cement production “Malcovskii portland cement” in the city of Fokino, Bryanskii region, central Russia on the probability of hospital admissions for respiratory-related reasons. We use an aerodynamic dispersion model to calculate the level of pollutant exposure at the individual-patient level. We find evidence that an extra 1 mg/m3 inhaled concentration of silicon dust increases the probability of hospital admissions by 0.8% for elderly adults and 3% for elderly males.

Moreover, by dividing the city into four different regions according to the average exposure and including a measure of persistency, our research design allows us to identify a non-linear (concave) response of the individual probability of hospital admissions to the average daily inhaled concentrations in the city area where exposure is higher. A decrease in silicon dust concentration of the Russian daily standard level (from 320 to 60 mg/m3) decreases the number of hospital admissions by 9.6% among children who inhale high levels of silicon dust, which leads to potential savings around 0.2% of the regional annual health public budget. Therefore, our findings may contribute to better informing policymakers when designing sustainable environmental policies to reduce ambient local air pollution exposure (industrial air pollution) in Russia.

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