According to a lot of studies done recently, there is a relationship between poor health and a high level of air pollution. For instance, even if you are exposed to air pollutants for a short period of time, you may still suffer from different types of respiratory issues, such as lung cancer, heart disease, and respiratory infections. In this article, we are going to take a look at a study that proves that there is a relationship between labor productivity and pollutants in the air. Read on to find out more.
According to experts, air pollution may have a negative impact on human capital. In other words, if employees work in a polluted environment, their wellbeing, punctuality, and communication skills will suffer incredibly.
However, more research studies are required in order to know about the effects of air pollution when it comes to labor productivity. This is partly because researchers find it difficult to quantify the link between the two.
In other words, they want to make sure that the measure is trustworthy. Apart from this, researchers need other information, such as the number of hours employees worked and the payments they received over a long period of time. And the thing is that it is not easy to obtain this information.
Apart from this, it is difficult to find the difference between an employee’s willingness to work and the effect of air pollution on how much they can produce in a given period of time.
In order to resolve this problem, a Chinese research group used a data set provided by a present factory. In the factory, workers are not allowed to choose the types of jobs they can do. Apart from this, they are paid wages based on the volume of units produced by them. In other words, they measured based on the products they produced, not the number of hours worked. Besides, they documented the record on monthly basis.
According to the analysis of the study, the researchers found that increasing the pollution in the factory resulted in a 4% reduction in the productivity of the workers. However, this negative impact is different based on demographic groups. For example, younger and senior workers tend to be more sensitive to the number of pollutants in the air than other age groups.
Similarly, workers who were highly educated were more sensitive to air pollution. In addition, there is a considerable nonlinear link between labor productivity and air pollution. They also found that the productivity of employees drops in response to an increase in the API.
So, it was found that understanding the larger impact of polluted air on human behavior is essential if the government wants to put together the best environmental policy.