Killer Cities: Past and Present.

Industrial pollution was endemic to the industrial cities of the 19th century and remains a feature of some modern cities, particularly industrial cities in emerging economies. This study compares the relationship between pollution and mortality in both the historical and modern context, focusing on English cities in the mid-19th century and Chinese cities in 2000. For both contexts, we construct proxies for district pollution levels based on their industrial composition and information on the pollution level of industries, as well as a similar set of control variables. Our results reveal a positive relationship between industrial pollution and mortality in both contexts, but the relationship was roughly five times stronger in historical England than in modern China. This suggests that, while substantial progress has been made, industrial pollution remains an important health risk in modern cities. ∗We thank Leah Boustan, Dora Costa, Matt Kahn, Adriana Lleras-Muney, Till van Wachter and seminar participants at the UCLA Luskin/Law School workshop for helpful comments. Part of the data used in this project was collected as part of a grant from the California Center for Population Research at UCLA. Corresponding author contact information: 8283 Bunch Hall, UCLA, 405 Hilgard Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90095, [email protected]. Pollution remains a substantial health threat in modern cities. For example, a 2012 World Health Organization report attributed 3.7 million premature deaths to ambient air pollution. Of these, about 88% occur in lowand middle-income countries, chiefly in East and South Asia. In Chinese cities, one of the subjects of this study, the air of booming mega-cities is sometimes so thick with soot that news reports have dubbed it an “airpocalypse” and the contribution of air pollution is estimated to have led to 1.2 million excess deaths in 2010 (New York Times, April 1, 2013). While striking, these experiences are not unprecedented. In the industrial cities late 19th and early 20th century England – the second focus of this study – pollution was also substantial. Troesken & Clay (2011) estimate that in the winter of 1890-91, adverse weather conditions that trapped the smoke in London led to 7,405 excess deaths in that city alone, while the Great London Fog of 1956 is estimated to have killed over 5,000. How similar is the pollution experience of modern China to that experienced by industrial countries in history? How much progress has been made in reducing the effects of pollution in urban areas? One reason that we care about the answers to these questions stems from work on the Environmental Kuznets Curve (Grossman & Krueger (1995)), which suggests that pollution will respond to rising income by following a predictable inverted U-shaped path. Support for this idea rests in part on the observed evolution of pollution levels in early industrializing countries, including England. This point is highlighted by Zheng & Kahn (2013), who write, “A long-run urban environmental history for developed nations suggests that local environmental problems could improve in Chinese cities.” Similarly, Vennemo et al. (2009) argue that, “China’s development with respect to environmental pollution appears to be following a path that is similar to the one established by more industrialized countries when they were at earlier stages of development.” A second reason to care about the questions above is that we may be able to use the experiences of early industrial cities in places like England, where richer data are often available, to learn about the impacts of high pollution levels in modern cities, where some types of data are often less available. This study evaluates the similarity of modern and historical experiences by focusing on the impact of industrial pollution in two settings, England from 1861-1890 and China in 2000. This comparison is motivated in part by the fact that historical England and modern China were major industrial producers. It has also been suggested