Evaluation of Yellow-Dust Storms and Countermeasure Policies in North China Using Regional Input-Output Models

The frequent yellow-dust storms in China in recent years have widely disrupted economic activities, destroyed farm land, and created a great hazard to human health. Meanwhile, there are various programs with vast investment from different levels of governments In China to prevent, and mitigate the impact of yellow-dust storms. However, little is known about the casual factors, socioeconomic impact of yellow-dust storms, and the effectiveness of those investments. This paper designs an evaluation framework by incorporating four major elements: yellow-dust storm occurrences, economic activities, environmental resources, and policy initiatives. Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques are used to process spatial environmental data to quantify the causal relationship between yellow-dust storm occurrences, and environmental resources and climatic factors. The trans-boundary impact is also controlled by creating a set of models with different buffer zones around observation locations. Input-output techniques are applied to evaluate the immediate, delayed, direct, and indirect impact of yellow-dust storms on economic activities. Both demanddriven and supply-driven impacts are calculated for Beijing, China based on data collected in 2003. Then, a framework to evaluate policy initiatives is constructed. A particular investment project, the Beijing-Tianjin Sand Source Treatment Engineering program, is chosen to do a cost-benefit analysis based on the above results. The result indicates a big success at the starting year of this project, but ever since the benefit-cost ratio has been declining. This research illustrates a holistic approach to deal with new emerging global environmental issues like yellow-dust storms, and the associated challenges and opportunities that input-output techniques face in the process.