Invisible killer under the blue sky：Ozone pollution and infant mortality in China

There is growing empirical evidence that air pollution will increase infant mortality in developed countries. Less understood is invisible pollution under the blue sky—causal effects of ozone pollution on infant mortality in developing countries, especially China. In this paper, we manually collect Chinese mortality data of 160 cities and adopt a mixed two-stage least squares (M2SLS) method to estimate the causal effects of ozone pollution on infant mortality and under-5-child mortality during 2015–2018. We find that 10 μg/m3 rise from ozone pollution causes 60 additional infant deaths per 100,000 (16 %), and 100 additional children under 5 years old deaths per 100,000 (20 %). During the sample period, the rising ozone pollution would kill about 90,000 children under 5 years old and incur economic losses of more than 670 billion yuan. This paper contributes to our knowledge of detrimental health effects of ozone pollution in developing countries.