The Bank's Duty

The World Bank should reveal the data it has on the vast human toll from pollution in China.

LIKE MOST developing countries, China has industrialized with little thought to environmental consequences. Since it has been so rapid and has occurred on such a massive scale, China's economic boom is producing a unique environmental disaster. And its Communist Party rulers' instinct to control flows of information adds a special challenge.

Here's one example. China fuels its factories and power plants with high-sulfur coal, with the result that, according to the World Bank, four of the 10 smoggiest cities on Earth are in China: Tianjin, Chongqing, Shenyang and Zhengzhou. And economists at the bank, in cooperation with Chinese government experts, recently came up with some even scarier statistics. Toxic air and water are killing an estimated 710,000 to 760,000 Chinese each year. Even in a country of more than 1.3 billion people, that is a shocking toll.

The good news is that China was willing to do a high-quality study in the first place. Alas, higher authorities responded to the mortality figures as they have reacted to many other unflattering but true reports about health and safety conditions in their country: with coverup and denial. The Chinese State Environment Protection Administration (SEPA) demanded that the World Bank expunge the pollution-death estimates from a report jointly prepared by SEPA and World Bank analysts, which was presented in preliminary form at a conference in March in Beijing. Chinese officials told the bank that the numbers were too sensitive and might contribute to growing unrest over environmental scandals. Last week, after the Financial Times broke the story, a government official explained that, since the final report has not been released, "the issue that China has requested the World Bank to delete related data does not exist."

Yes, it does. Ironically, in this instance, one of the bank's goals was to nudge the government toward greater candor. As even the bowdlerized report correctly notes, in China, "substantially more information is needed in order to understand the health and non-health consequences of pollution." The bank has little leverage over the countries with which it works on such studies, since its own policies require it to make "adjustments" on "matters of concern" to host governments. Still, this appears to be a case in which the concern was not legitimate, and the bank should rethink its policy in light of it. At a minimum, it should push to make the truth about pollution's toll in China clear in the final report, which is expected by March.