Air Pollution in Indian Cities

I recently finished a draft of a paper I've been working on for a while, titled, "The Effect of Social and Economic Development on Air Pollution in Indian Cities."  I'll be soliciting feedback on it over the next few weeks in preparation for submission to an academic journal.

Recently I became aware of two sources of estimates for average income at the local level which I use in the study.  There are no city-level average income estimates available for Indian cities, but if you are looking for district-level average income estimates for Indian cities, I suggest these sources you can find here and here.

Here is the abstract:

This paper presents new estimates of air pollution production functions using data from Indian cities.  The resulting estimates enable tests of various hypotheses concerning the effect of income, literacy, population and other variables on four measures of air pollution: sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and two measures of particulate matter.  Controlling for multiple factors, we find of a negative relationship between income and particulate matter, though the precise form of the relationship depends on how income is measured.  We find  little relationship between income and sulfur dioxide emissions, and a positive relationship between income and nitrogen dioxide emissions.  We find a weakly non-linear relationship between literacy and three of four air pollution measures, whereby pollution levels at first increase and eventually decrease with rising literacy.  Finally, we briefly consider the effect of industry type on the four pollution measures.

 

Please send me an email if you have any comments or questions on this paper!