Water quality monitoring and mortality: evidence from China

Understanding the implementation of environmental regulation is essential to the design of environmental policy. The impact of water pollution regulation on mortality was examined in this study using a spatial regression discontinuity (RD) design based on China’s water quality monitoring system. Because water quality readings are important to the political promotion of officials and water quality monitoring stations only capture water pollution from upstream, local governments have an incentive to combat water pollution upstream, not downstream. Exploring this discontinuity in the stringency of regulations by linking the 2010 census microdata with water quality monitoring station location data in China, we found that households immediately upstream of a monitoring station faced a more than 11% reduction in household mortality compared to households immediately downstream of a monitoring station. Strict water quality supervision had a greater effect on mortality in rural households. The difference in mortality between upstream and downstream households was even greater for monitoring stations with high implementation and automatic monitoring technology. The results of this study improve our understanding of the health effects of environmental regulation, as well as the design and implementation of environmental regulation policies under a centralized political system.