China Review International

Haidong Kan
Clearing the Air: The Health and Economic Damages of Air Pollution in China (review)
China Review International - Volume 15, Number 3, 2008, pp. 383-385

University of Hawai'i Press

Project MUSE - China Review International - Clearing the Air: The Health and Economic Damages of Air Pollution in China (review) Project MUSE Journals China Review International Volume 15, Number 3, 2008 Clearing the Air: The Health and Economic Damages of Air Pollution in China (review) China Review International Volume 15, Number 3, 2008 E-ISSN: 1527-9367 Print ISSN: 1069-5834 DOI: 10.1353/cri.0.0187 Reviewed by Haidong Kan Mun S. Ho and Chris P. Nielsen, editors. Clearing the Air: The Health and Economic Damages of Air Pollution in China. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. xviii, 387 pp. Hardcover $50.00, ISBN 978-0-262-08358-4. China's economic expansion over the past quarter of a century has been one of the strongest in world history. Such an economic expansion, however, is driven by fossil fuels, which increase its emissions of both local air pollutants and greenhouse gases dramatically. Since 2006, China has overtaken the United States as the largest emitter of carbon dioxide emissions. Although China has achieved great progress in the control of air pollution, it is still among the countries with the worst air pollution level in the world. There has been a large body of studies documenting an ever widening range of adverse health effects of air pollution in China.1 The increased cardiopulmonary risks found in China are similar in magnitude, per amount of pollution, to the risks found in other parts of the world. But the importance of these...