<p class="first" id="d4360401e72">Since entering the new era, China's socialist contradiction
has been transformed into
the contradiction between the people's growing need for a better life and the unbalanced
and inadequate development. How to improve the quality of people's life through the
improvement of air quality has become an important content restricting social development
and a key problem to be solved. Based on the life satisfaction (LS) method, this study
takes air quality into the individual utility function, and through matching China
Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), two phases of microindividual tracking
data with 122 urban environmental quality data innovatively investigate the impact
of air quality on residents' LS and its income substitution effect. The results show
that air quality significantly reduces residents' LS, among which, different air pollutants
and comprehensive air quality AQI have significant negative effects. And PM10 has
the highest marginal effect on different LS evaluation, SO2 has the smallest marginal
effect, and AQI marginal effect is close to PM10. In terms of group heterogeneity,
NO2 and SO2 have group influence differences in age group, regional economic group,
gender group, and family per capita income group. But PM10 and AQI do not show group
influence heterogeneity, and air quality has significant negative effect on LS of
different groups. In addition, the interaction between air quality and income level
shows that air quality strengthens the difference of residents' LS caused by income
level difference. According to the equilibrium condition of residents' individual
utility function, the improvement of air quality by 1% is equivalent to the improvement
of residents' LS by 23.4402% of income. Firstly, air quality has an important impact
on residents' LS, and different air pollutants have different effects. Secondly, the
impact of air quality on LS of different groups is heterogeneous and mainly diversified
in age group, regional economic group, gender group, and family per capital income
group. Finally, there is substitution effect between air quality and regional GDP
growth and household income, which affects residents' LS. Thirdly, the conclusion
shows that the improvement of air quality is difficult to be replaced by other ways.
Good air quality can not only directly improve residents' LS, but also has economic
effect.
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