Encouraging cities to be more transparent about their governance of air quality reduces pollution

What is it about?

While transparency has been suggested as a means to improve governance, it is difficult to know whether it works because people and governments may self-select to be transparent when they're performing well. We use an experiment that randomly assigned 25 cities in China to rating of their transparency, which increased transparency. Those cities, in turn, reduced air pollution over the following years. Cities increased their inspections of polluting firms and high polluting firms reduced their emissions.

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Photo by Marcin Jozwiak on Unsplash

Photo by Marcin Jozwiak on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Air pollution is a major source of health problems and deaths around the world. We show that simple improvements to the transparency of governments can reduce air pollution. We estimate that more than 2000 lives were saved in the cities we studied. Thus, increasing transparency has great potential to save lives around the world.