| With the rapid development of urbanization and industrialization, air pollution has become an important issue of China. Abudant epidemiological studies indicate that there are significant links between air pollution and a variety of of health endpoints, including premature deaths, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. Compared with the United States and Europe, relevant studiesin China are relatively small. Therefore, it is particularly important to assess the relationship between air pollutants and health effects.This study analyzed the data on air pollutant concentrations in Jinan from 2013 to 2014, and found PM2.5 and O3 levels were relatively high and presented the obvious seasonal variations. Using generalized additive models (GAM) with Poisson regression, which control for the long-time trend, the "day of week" effect and meteorological parameters, this research explored the relationships between ambient air pollutants and hospital emergency room visits (ERVs) for respiratory diseases. In one-pollutant models for total population, the best fit lag-day for PM2.5 is lagO2, and the best fit lag-day for SO2 and NO2 is same, Iag2. On this condition, an increase of 10 μg/m3 in PM2.5, SO2 and NO2 was associated with an increase of 1.8%[95% confidence interval (95%CI):0.7%,2.9%],0.7%(95%CI:0.1%,1.3%) and 1.9%(95% CI:0.3%,3.5%) in daily number of ERVs for respiratory diseasesrespiratory. When the analysis was stratified by gender, it was found that all three pollutants had significant impacts on females, while males were only sensitive to PM2.5. By adjusting SO2 or NO2 in the multi-pollutant model for the total population, we found PM2.5 remained a significant association with the morbidity of respiratory diseases. In addition, we also introduced two monitoring indicators of ozone (maximum one-hour concentration andmaximum sliding average eight-hourconcentration), and observed significant associations with daily number of ERVs for respiratory diseases during warm seasons. An increase of 10μg/m3 in 03-1h and O3-8h was associated with an increase of 1.4%(95% CI:0.1%,2.7%) and 1.7%(95%CI:0.3%,3.1%).According to the principles of application of contingent valuation method (CVM), we tried to investigate local residents’preference forgood air quality in different willingness-to-pay (WTP) circumstances. As to the WTP question of hypothetical air quality improvement (HAQI), the subsample of positive WTP accounted for 50.42%. The results of two-part model showed that the residents with higher household annual income, and shorter residency in Jinan were more likely to be willing to pay, and the expenditure for respiratory diseases, education and household annual income were significantly positively associated with the amount of WTP for HAQI. With the adjustment of consumer price index (CPI), the average WTP value for HAQI in 2006 (127 CNY per year) was found to be higher than that in 2014 (101.32 CNY per year). With respect to another WTP question of hypothetical clean air (HCA), the subsample of positive WTP accounted for 59.05%. The average WTP value for HCA was estimated to be 152.56 CNY per year. When both two WTP questions were introduced to the respondents, it was found that the percentage of participants who were willing to pay for HCA was 61.9%, while the percentage for HAQI only accounted for 38.9%. The estimated average WTP for HCA was 74.28 RMB per month, while the value for HAQI was 38.89 RMB per month. Those discrepancies indicate that there is anobvious "content-dependency" in the CVM researches, and.the awareness of environmental public participation in Jinan needs to be improved. |
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