My Thesis' Abstract
Primary PM2.5 emissions could cause considerable health damages in China, such as cardiovascular and respiratory diseases which will induce great mortality and morbidity related labor time loss. My research should thus focuses on relating monetary value of total output loss with decreasing working year due to PM2.5 related diseases across 30 Chinese provinces in 2007 using the approach of supply-driven Input-Output (I-O) model. This new proposed modelling framework is able to capture the cascading effects throughout inter-industry linkages compared with traditional methods including Human Capital and Willingness To Pay approaches and thus indicates a much higher PM2.5 related health costs in China than existing findings.  My previous work on this shows that a total economic loss of almost 1,000 billion Yuan based on the available data on the population of PM2.5 related mortality and morbidity (hospital admissions and outpatient visits) in China during 2007 which is however encountered with great uncertainty due to the lack of data availability. Therefore, my research should stem from this standpoint and develop a more sophisticated I-O modelling framework to take more factors into account so that such model could become applicable onto measuring climate-change related health costs (supply-side) in both short- and long-term in the future. I am also urging the involvement of risk, impact and interdependency analyses in health costs prediction in order to sketch a more comprehensive picture of both direct and indirect economic loss occurred on the supply-side due to PM2.5 air pollution.