Estrada Maldonado, J. O.
EN ES
← All research

Economic impact of air pollution on health and productivity in Małopolskie Region, Poland

Jesús Osvaldo Estrada Maldonado — sole author

Conference paper, January 2025 Bucharest, Romania Period 2013–2018 English

The question

Particulate pollution in the Małopolskie region of southern Poland has been causing serious problems for both human health and the regional economy. The usual way of pricing that damage counts hospital admissions and premature deaths. This study asks whether that accounting misses the larger number, and finds that it does, by a wide margin.

Data and method

  • Air quality: European Environment Agency monitoring data, 2013–2018.
  • Health outcomes: Eurostat health records for the same region and period.
  • Cognitive channel: estimated by applying published exposure–response functions (Zhang et al., 2018) to observed concentration levels, then translating the implied cognitive decline into foregone labour productivity.

The design deliberately combines two literatures that rarely meet: environmental epidemiology, which measures what pollution does to bodies, and labour economics, which measures what cognitive capacity is worth. The bridge between them is the exposure–response function.

Exposure

WHO guideline values were exceeded by a wide margin throughout the period.

PM2.5 vs WHO5–7.7×
PM10 vs WHO2.6–3.1×
Average concentrations relative to WHO recommended levels, Małopolskie 2013–2018. Bars scaled to the PM2.5 upper bound.

Health outcomes

Respiratory deaths+23%
Hospitalisations+26%
Change in 2018 relative to 2013. Poland's ageing population explains a substantial share of this trend, and the paper is explicit that these figures are not attributable to pollution alone.

The economic result

The striking finding sits on the economic side. Lost productivity attributable to pollution-linked cognitive impairment amounts to approximately €1.18 billion, accounting for more than 96% of the total estimated economic cost of air pollution in the region.

Cognitive productivity loss>96%
All other channels<4%
Composition of the total economic cost of particulate pollution in Małopolskie. The channel that policy prices least is the one that dominates.
Air quality policy needs to address more than immediate respiratory effects. The cognitive and productivity dimensions appear substantial and should not be ignored in policy planning.

Why it matters beyond Poland

Most regional air quality regulation is calibrated against mortality and morbidity thresholds. If the cognitive channel is of the order estimated here, then cost–benefit analyses of abatement policy across Europe, and in comparably polluted Latin American metropolitan areas, Guadalajara among them, are systematically understating the return on cleaner air. The methodological contribution is a transferable one: any region with monitoring data and labour statistics can run the same estimation.

Limitations

The cognitive-loss estimate is an extrapolation from exposure–response functions estimated elsewhere, not a direct measurement of cognitive outcomes in this population. Demographic ageing confounds the raw mortality and hospitalisation trends. Both are stated plainly in the paper rather than buried; the estimate should be read as an order of magnitude that justifies direct measurement, not as a settled figure.