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Dirty skies lower subjective well-being

Cheng, Lu; Mi, Zhifu; Wei, Yi-Ming; Wang, Shidong; Hubacek, Klaus; (2022) Dirty skies lower subjective well-being. Journal of Cleaner Production , 378 , Article 134380. 10.1016/j.jclepro.2022.134380. Green open access

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Abstract

Self-reported life satisfaction of China's population has not improved as much as expected during the economic boom, which was accompanied by a significant decline in environmental performance. Is environmental pollution the culprit for the lagging subjective well-being? To explore this issue, this paper adopts the sentiment analysis method to construct a real-time daily subjective well-being metric at the city level based on the big data of online search traces. Using daily data from 13 Chinese cities centred on Beijing between August 2014 and December 2019, we look at the corelation between subjective well-being and air pollution and the heterogeneity in this relationship based on two separate identification strategies. We find that air pollutants are negatively correlated with subjective well-being, and well-being tends to decline more from pollution during hot seasons. In addition, residents in wealthier regions tend to be more sensitive to air pollution. This result may be explained by the differences in the subjective perception of air pollution and personal preferences at different levels of income. These findings provide information about the concerns of the public to the central government, thereby helping it take appropriate actions to respond to the dynamics of subjective well-being.

Type: Article
Title: Dirty skies lower subjective well-being
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2022.134380
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2022.134380
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © 2022 The Authors. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Keywords: Subjective well-being, Air pollution, Big data, Sentiment analysis
UCL classification: UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10156786
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