Brown Issues and Health

Program Coordinator:  Susmita Dasgupta

Industrial Pollution (New Ideas in Pollution Regulation)
Environment & Health

Resource Persons
Documents

Industrial Pollution (New Ideas in Pollution Regulation)
Environmental agencies in many developing countries are beginning to use benefit-cost analysis in designing strategies for regulating pollution. However, they have been seriously hampered by lack of data on industrial emissions, pollution damage, and abatement costs. In addition, many environment agencies have become interested in experimenting with market-based and public information approaches to pollution regulation.

In response to these needs, a collaborative program of research, policy experimentation and evaluation focused on major industrializing nations of the developing world (Brazil, China, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and the Philippines) and their environmental agencies.

The results of this work culminated in a Policy Research Report: Greening Industry: New Roles for Communities, Markets and Governments (1999), and were disseminated via collaborative programs with the World Bank Institute and the World Bank Environment Department.

Datasets

• China Pollution Intensities for Water Pollutants COD and TSS
  Air pollutants dust, smoke and sulphur dioxide. Intensities based on data from the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) in China.
• IPPS Pollution Intensity and Abatement Cost Datasets
• Mexico Air Pollution Intensities
  This dataset has employment intensities for particulates, sulphur oxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, and hydrocarbons at the ISIC 2 and 3 digit levels. Also included are intensities by firm size for small, medium, and large plants.
• Pollution Indicators and Status for China
• Quantifying Environmental Performance Survey Results
• ToxInt: The Toxic Intensities Database
  Which has toxic intensities and risk for 246 TRI chemicals. Similar to the IPPS data, these intensities can be used to estimate toxic chemical load given employment, value of output, or value added.
• What Improves Environmental Performance? Evidence from Mexican Industry

Environment & Health
Health-related research has focused primarily on three topics:

Air Pollution in World Cities:  Scarce public resources have limited the monitoring of atmospheric particulate matter (PM) concentrations in developing countries, despite large potential health effects.  As a result, policymakers in many developing countries remain uncertain about the exposure of their residents to PM air pollution. The team’s Global Model of Ambient Particulates (GMAPS) is an attempt to bridge this gap  by providing projections/ estimates of PM concentrations for 3,226 world cities with populations larger than 100,000.  More...

Indoor Air Pollution:  Acute respiratory infections from indoor air pollution—from burning wood, animal dung, and other bio-fuels— are estimated to kill one million children annually in developing countries. Despite the severity of the problem, there is a general lack of data on indoor air quality in developing countries due to the high cost of indoor air monitoring. Information remains largely anecdotal. Ongoing work on indoor air pollution involves monitoring indoor air quality in developing countries and investigating the determinants of indoor air pollution. More...

Toxic Pollution from Agriculture: Excessive chemical pesticide use can injure the health of agricultural workers, damage ecosystems, and pose dangers for consumers of agricultural products. Existing knowledge of health and environmental effects of pesticides in developing countries is largely anecdotal, because data scarcity has impeded empirical work. For the past several years, the team has examined the severity of toxic agricultural pollution in developing countries and has analyzed the potential for adopting safer production methods. More...

Resource Persons

• Craig Meisner
• Hua Wang
• Susmita Dasgupta

Documents
The policy research working papers below are drawn from the World Bank's institutional archives. Each link opens a page with an abstract of the document and several download options. Choose the 'light-weight documents' option for easy download.

You can also download other related documents. These include content-rich current outputs (updated document versions, miscellaneous documents, and web pages).