Analysis of The World Bank’s Findings on Air Pollution

Analysis of The World Bank’s Findings on Air Pollution (PM10 Concentration) in World Cities

The World Bank is an international non-governmental organization with the goal of aiding developing countries throughout the world with financial and technical assistance. Besides the obvious concern of financial stability for the impoverished countries of the world, the World Bank also focuses on education, health, infrastructure, and communications. Our analysis deals with the environment and infrastructure aspects of the World Bank’s work. The World Bank provided us with the dataset entitled “Air Pollution in World Cities (PM10 Concentration).” “PM” stands for particulate matter pollution in the air. This dataset showed every major city in the world with a population of 100,000 or more and also every country’s PM concentration. The country-based portion of the dataset was used for this analysis. The primary determinants of PM concentrations are the scale and composition of economic activity, population, the energy mix, the strength of local pollution regulation, and geographic and atmospheric conditions that affect pollutant dispersion in the atmosphere. (World Bank) Thanks to economic improvements throughout the world and technological advancements, PM10 concentration has increased at a very slow rate.

The objective of this analysis was to determine the pollution concentration of several regions throughout the world, including Africa, Asia, Australia/Oceania, Central America, Europe, the Middle East, North America, and South America. Our original null hypothesis was that the μ of the pollution concentration of each region was equal. Conversely, the alternative hypothesis states that the μ of each region is not equal. We used se...

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... show the discrepancy between region means, but it can also be physically observed when comparing the two extremes of Europe at 30.95 and Africa at 73.31 PM10 concentrations. It is obvious from the results of this analysis that the world has a wide range of pollution effects. Traditionally more advanced regions such as Europe and North America have pollution under control because of a stable economy and a wide array of technological resources. Other regions such as Africa and Central America are struggling with pollution, relative to more developed regions, improvements in technology and structural shifts (World Bank) in the world economy are helping these regions keep air pollution to a minimum.

WORKS CITED

1. The World Bank http://econ.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTRESEARCH/0,,contentMDK:20785646~pagePK:64214825~piPK:64214943~theSitePK:469382,00.html