TY - JOUR T1 -

Water Pollution and Digestive Cancers in China

JF - Review of Economics and Statistics Y1 - 2012 A1 - Ebenstein, Avraham AB - China’s rapid industrialization has led to a severe deterioration in water quality in the country’s lakes and rivers. By exploiting variation in pollution across China’s river basins, I estimate that a deterioration of water quality by a single grade (on a six-grade scale) increases the digestive cancer death rate by 9.7%. The analysis rules out other potential explanations such as smoking rates, dietary patterns, and air pollution. I estimate that doubling China’s levy rates for wastewater dumping would save roughly 17,000 lives per year but require an additional $500 million in annual spending on wastewater treatment. VL - 94 IS - 1 ER -