Socioeconomic Impact Analysis of Yellow-dust Storms: An Approach and Case Study for Beijing

Dust storms can extensively disrupt socioeconomic activities and pose hazards to human health and the ecosystem; yet no one has made a systematic analysis of dust storms from an economic perspective. Using a case study for Beijing in 2000, we present a preliminary analysis of socioeconomic impacts of yellow-dust storms, integrating regional economic analysis models with environmental-economic evaluation techniques. Our analyses demonstrate that the costs of delayed effects of yellow-dust storms can be higher than those of the immediate effects, and that the impacts potentially caused by supply effects can be greater than those caused by demand effects. Because this is a preliminary analysis with extremely limited data, our primary purpose is not to produce precise numerical results, but to develop an integrated model that policy analysts can use and further improve in order to evaluate the comprehensive impacts of other phenomena with similar properties more accurately.