ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Environmental Health and Exposome
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1662116
This article is part of the Research TopicClimate Change, Air Pollution, and Health Inequality: Vulnerability of Marginalized PopulationsView all 26 articles
Health benefits versus economic costs: Welfare analysis of energy conservation and emission reduction
Provisionally accepted
- 1Liaoning University, Shenyang, China
- 2Dongbei University of Finance and Economics, Dalian, China
- 3Anhui University, Hefei, China
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A multidimensional and comprehensive evaluation of the impact of energy conservation and emission reduction (ECER) on residents' health and welfare is conducive to resolving conflicts between economy and environment on a worldwide scale. Based on China's ECER demonstration city policy, this paper uses a staggered difference-in-differences method to examine the impact of ECER on residents' health and labor market performance, and conservatively estimates the welfare effect of ECER in conjunction with a theoretical model. The results show that ECER significantly improves residents' health, raises self-rated health (β = 0.06, p < 0.05, 95% CI = -0.17-0.13), reduces the probability of illness affecting work (β = -0.004, p < 0.05, 95% CI = -0.01-0.01), and lowers medical expenditures (β = -0.183, p < 0.05, 95% CI = -0.64-0.10). However, ECER negatively affects residents' labor market performance, reducing employment status (β = -0.032, p < 0.10, 95% CI = -0.11-0.06) and wage (β = -0.055, p < 0.05, 95% CI = -0.23-0.00). Mechanism analysis suggests that ECER primarily improves health by reducing emissions of pollutants such as urban industrial wastewater, industrial sulphur dioxide, and industrial fumes and dust, and negatively influences labor market performance by promoting industrial restructuring. Heterogeneity analysis shows that there is a selection effect in the impacts, the health benefits and economic costs of ECER are mostly achieved and borne by groups in rural areas, non-provincial capitals, and those suffering from chronic diseases and not engaging in physical activity. Welfare analysis suggests that the health benefits of ECER result in higher welfare gains than the negative welfare impacts of its economic effects. Future policies should progressively move towards an integrated assessment of the costs and benefits of ECER, paying particular attention to welfare losses among groups that bear higher costs.
Keywords: Health effect, Welfare analysis, Labor market performance, energy conservation andemission reduction, a longitudinal study
Received: 08 Jul 2025; Accepted: 10 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhao, Chen and Feng. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Nan Feng, Anhui University, Hefei, China
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