#air pollution

International transboundary air pollution poses a significant threat to the global economy and health, yet conventional economic analyses seldom incorporate this phenomenon. By integrating transboundary particle trajectory data with individual-level mortality and emergency department visit records, we find that air pollution from China significantly increases mortality and morbidity in South Korea. We evaluate the spillover benefits of recent Chinese environmental regulations and find that a country's environmental policies could generate substantial hidden benefits for neighboring countries. Finally, we demonstrate that China's potentially strategic reductions in pollution could have undermined these benefits, highlighting the implications for additional gains through Coasian bargaining.

This paper studies how transboundary pollution enters domestic politics. When air pollution crosses borders, citizens may observe local pollution without knowing whether the source is foreign or domestic, creating scope for politicians either to provide information or to shift blame abroad. We study South Korea, where fine-dust episodes are salient and pollution from China is a recurring focus of public debate. Combining source-specific pollution shocks with a politician-day panel of Facebook posts by South Korean legislators, we distinguish between environmental attention and explicit attribution to China. Instrumental-variables estimates provide little evidence that exogenous increases in local PM2.5 raise politicians' broad environmental communication. By contrast, the clearest evidence consistent with strategic foreign attribution appears in partisan heterogeneity: conditional on discussing fine dust, conservative politicians increase foreign attribution in response to both transboundary and domestic shocks, whereas Democratic estimates are small and statistically indistinguishable from zero. Transboundary environmental problems thus affect politics through selective blame shifting rather than a uniform increase in foreign attribution.