Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Multidimensional poverty measures usually include crucial dimensions of wellbeing such as education, health, employment and housing. Scholars have recently highlighted the need to include other relevant dimensions, one of which is pollution. In this exploratory paper we relate poverty status of census units to three different measures of the level of pollution in Santiago, Chile. First, we estimate the poverty condition by constructing a socio-economic indicator at the block level by means of census data. Then, using data from all air pollution stations we interpolate pollution for all Santiago. Finally, we include information of noise levels and the distance to landfills in the area. Methodologically, we use spatial techniques to correlate all indicators. Results suggest there is a positive and decreasing relationship between pollution and socio-economic status that follows the environmental curve of Kuznets. There is also a significant relationship between the distance to the landfill and the socio-economic status of the census area. Results regarding noise pollution are not conclusive.