TY - JOUR TI - The effects of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games on air quality and public health DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T36971WS PY - 2014 AB - The elevated air pollution level has frequently put China under the world’s spotlight. To better prepare for the 2008 Olympic Games, China had taken a series of radical control actions to improve air quality, including plant closure and relocation, temporary production halt or reduction, furnace replacement, and stringent traffic control along with additional Olympic transportation options. Such actions were carried out in a large geographic area including Beijing and five adjacent provinces, namely, Hebei, Inner Mongolia, Shandong, Shanxi and Tianjin, with a significant cost totaling up to over US$10 billion, which partly made the Beijing Games the most expensive Olympic Games in the history. The objective of this thesis is to investigate the Olympic effect on air quality and public health. In this study, both air quality data and hospital inpatient records (HIR) before and after the Olympic Games are collected for the Olympic city (Beijing) and non-Olympic city (Shijiazhuang, the capital city of Hebei province). The official daily air pollution index (API) published by the Ministry of Environmental Protection of China (MEP) is used to measure air quality. The HIR are collected from both surgical and respiratory departments in one main hospital of each city. Both data cover the time span from June 5th, 2001 to December 31, 2009 for both cities. Based on the quasi-experimental technique, Difference-in-Difference (DID) analyses, I find that not only the Olympic Games had positive effects in air quality, but the air quality improvement also lasted even after the game, though in a smaller magnitude. On the other hand, the effects of Olympic Games on public health are limited. KW - Food and Business Economics KW - Air--Pollution--China--Beijing KW - Sports facilities--China--Beijing--Health aspects LA - eng ER -