Happy Lunar New Year from the USC US-China Institute!
The Impact of Water Quality on Health and Youth Education: Evidence from the Drinking Water Infrastructure Program in Rural China
Asia Health Policy Program and Shorenstein APARC host a talk by Jing Zhang on the effects of water quality on child development and health in China.
Jing Zhang
Assistant Professor at Renmin University of China
Providing people with safe drinking water is one of the most important health-related infrastructure programs in the world. The first part of our research investigates the effect of a major water quality improvement program in rural China on the health of adults and children. Using panel data covering about 4500 households from 1989 to 2006, we estimate the impact of introducing village-level access to water from water plants on various measures of health. The regression results imply that the illness incidence of adults decreased by 11 percent and their weight-for-height increased by 0.835 kg/m, and that children's weight-for-height and height itself both rose by 0.446 kg/m and 0.962 cm respectively, as a result of the program. And these estimates are quite stable across different robustness checks.
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