Greening for Health: The Impact of Central Environmental Protection Inspection on Urban Residents’ Health Welfare

Reconciling high-level environmental protection with public health welfare is critical for sustainable development, underscoring the urgency of evaluating the human-centric impacts of environmental regulations. Utilizing a panel dataset of 258 Chinese prefecture-level cities from 2012 to 2023, this study employs a Double Machine Learning (DML) approach to empirically evaluate the impacts and underlying mechanisms of the Central Environmental Protection Inspection (CEPI) on urban residents’ health welfare. The results show that CEPI significantly improves urban residents’ health welfare. The positive effect is supported by a range of alternative model specifications and robustness checks. Heterogeneity analyses reveal distinct city-level variation in these health welfare gains: the positive impact of CEPI is more pronounced in cities with lower environmental health awareness and narrower income gaps, highlighting the inclusive nature of environmental welfare. Furthermore, the policy yields stronger benefits in cities meeting air quality standards than in non-attainment cities. Mechanism analysis suggests that industrial structural upgrading is a potential pathway through which CEPI affects residents’ health welfare, while the health welfare effect of CEPI varies with the level of green finance development. Overall, this study provides pivotal empirical evidence and policy insights for untangling the intricate linkages between environmental regulation and population welfare.