Bureaucrat incentives reduce crop burning and child mortality in South Asia.

ABSTRACT: Air pollution in South Asia is a health emergency, responsible for 2 million deaths every year¹. Crop residue burning accounts for 40-60% of peak pollution during the winter harvest months^2,3. Despite being illegal, this practice remains widespread^4,5. Any solution to curb the problem necessitates government action at scale. Here we study whether leveraging the incentives of bureaucrats tasked with controlling burning can mitigate this phenomenon. Using a decade of wind, fire and health data from satellites and surveys from the Demographic and Health Surveys Program, we show that crop burning responds to bureaucrat incentives: fires increase by 15% when wind is most likely to direct pollution to neighbouring jurisdictions, and decrease by 14.5% when it poll

SUBMITTER: Dipoppa G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11525172 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature