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A quantile regression analysis of mediating impacts of institutions in environmental quality‐health outcomes nexus in sub‐Saharan Africa
Abstract
This study examines the role of institutions in reducing a presumably negative impact of poor environmental quality on health outcomes, using a panel of 45 sub‐Saharan African countries over the period, 1996–2016. The empirical estimation is based on the panel quantile regression estimator. The study established inter alia: first, the declining health status occasioned by environmental degradation resulted in low life expectancy, high child mortality and increasing health expenditure. Second, strong institutional settings are needed to reverse the adverse effects of poor environmental quality on health outcomes. Thus, the minimum thresholds of control of corruption, government effectiveness, regulatory quality and overall institutions that restore human age expectancy are −0.37, −0.59, −0.40 and −0.40, respectively. In the same order, 0.08, −0.18, −0.41 and −0.15 are needed for health spending, whereas 0.24 of control of corruption and −0.21 of regulatory quality are needed to minimise child mortality. Third, the net effects of interactions do not align with the hypothesised relationships. Finally, we acknowledged the importance of some auxiliary indicators specific to each measure of health outcomes. On the policy front, setting‐up an innovative and sustainable agenda of green environment and clean growth seems critical to realising improved health conditions.
... Not taking care can lead to a higher mortality rate, eventually affecting LEX in the MINT nations. The outcome of this study supports several other empirical works that found an inverse interaction between AIP and LEX [10,18,27,31,47,101,102]. One core focus of this analysis is to evaluate the influence of HUC on LEX in the MINT countries. ...
Life expectancy (LEX) has gained relevance among health and environmental scholars due to the current upsurge in carbon emissions. As a result, this article examined the impact of economic development (ECD), air pollution (AIP), human capital (HUC), natural resources (NRR), and renewable energy consumption (REC) on LEX in the MINT countries. The DSK estimation approach was used to estimate the variables’ long-term interaction. The following are the main empirical findings from the analysis. First, the research discovered a positive, significant, and favourable nexus between ECD, HUC, REC, and LEX. Second, AIP and NRR have a detrimental and significant impact on LEX. Third, the causation analysis revealed a one-way link between economic development, renewable energy consumption, and LEX. This empirical research gives policy-makers unique ideas on using human capital, renewable energy, and economic growth as strategic tools to promote life expectancy. Therefore, MINT nations must employ the appropriate strategies to boost economic growth, human capital and renewable energy to improve life expectancy. On the other hand, these countries should enhance natural resource utilization and reduce carbon emissions to achieve a longer lifespan.
... The findings from the current analysis suggest that without appropriate measures being put in place, CEM could emerge as a cause for higher mortality rates, which could cause a lot of challenges to public health in these NAFTA countries. The outcome hypothesizes that pollutants generated through CEM cause a deteriorating influence on LEXP, and this finding collaborate with these erstwhile paper (Alimi et al. 2022;Barua et al. 2022;Bashir and Hidayat 2022;Hauer and Santos-Lozada 2021;Ibrahim 2022;Rjoub et al. 2021;Rodriguez-Alvarez 2021;Wang et al. 2022). ...
One essential component that reflects the development of society and the economy of most countries is life expectancy (LEXP). Nevertheless, LEXP can be influenced by varying factors, including socioeconomic and medical factors. Therefore, this analysis’s focal point and motivation is to explore how socioeconomic factors such as economic growth, technological innovation, carbon emission, human capital, and renewable energy affect LEXP. The study utilized panel data from 1990 to 2020 from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which consists of the USA, Mexico, and Canada. The initial test confirmed that the research series were stationary and cointegrated. Therefore, the research applied the cross-sectional autoregressive distributed lag (CS-ARDL) model to predict the paper’s short- and long-term estimates. The empirical estimated model concluded that human capital, renewable energy, technological innovation, and economic growth boost life expectancy. Contrarily, the outcome espoused that carbon emission has an inverse association with LEXP. The causality test confirmed a unidirectional interaction between human capital, economic growth, technological innovation, and life expectancy. On the other hand, there is a bidirectional connection between carbon emission, renewable energy, and life expectancy. The research suggests that stakeholders and policy-makers strengthen and enforce air quality standards to reduce pollution from industrial emissions and vehicle exhaust and encourage using cleaner technologies to promote LEXP. The research outcome is empirically and theoretically consistent, providing an essential breakthrough for environment-health-energy and economic development policies.
This research probes the functional association between natural resources, environmental pollution, and longevity in selected resource-dependent African countries with the intervening role of income level from 1980 to 2019. The empirical evidence relies on first-generation stationarity test, Kao (1999) co-integration test, fully modified OLS (FMOLS), dynamic OLS (DOLS), and quantile regression (QR) estimators. To ensure more precision on the stated nexus, natural resources are captured by four indicators comprising fuel, coal, gas (disaggregated), and fossil fuel (aggregated). Longevity is equally decomposed into life expectancy female, life expectancy male, and life expectancy total. Based on this segregation, the empirical analyses reveal the following findings: First, the impacts of natural resources are statistically negative on longevity. Second, environmental pollution turns out to be a negative predictor of longevity. Third, income significantly promotes longevity, and its interaction with natural resources moderates their adverse effects on longevity. Fourth, the severity of natural resources and environmental pollution proves to be intense across the low, middle, and upper quantiles except for natural gas. Fifth, the causal relationships among the variables are divergent, ranging from no causality to unidirectional and bidirectional. Following the empirical findings, the study recommends promoting cleaner energy resources through subsidizing renewable energy and enhancing the income level of the people through investment in capital projects to promote healthy life expectancy in the selected African countries and beyond.
This study examines the impact of environmental quality on health care spending in Nigeria from 1960-2011. The study adopts the ARDL Bounds testing approach to investigate the effects of environmental quality (proxied by CO 2 emissions) on healthcare spending in the long and short run periods.It was revealed that CO 2 emissions in metric tonnes per capita have positive impact on health spending in Nigeria both in the long run and in the short run, implying that as the environment quality deteriorates, health spending increases. The study therefore recommends that efforts towards stemming environmental degradation should be intensified at local, state and federal levels, through relevant ministries and agencies.
This study investigates the role of institutions in environment–health outcomes nexus in sub-Saharan African over the period 1996–2016. The study employs different surrogates for capturing the three key variables of concern. These include institutions consisting of control of corruption, government effectiveness, and regulatory quality; environment comprising of carbon emissions and ecological footprints; and health outcomes involving human longevity, child mortality and health expenditures respectively. The study based its empirical estimations on system of generalized method of moments, of which the following findings are established: First, environmental degradation captured with carbon emissions and ecological footprint is found to reduce human life expectancy by substantial statistical magnitudes. Second, carbon emissions are found to amplify the infant mortality rates, even when the variable interacts with institutional quality variables like government ineffectiveness and poor regulatory quality. Third, both carbon emissions and ecological footprint are found to escalate the cost of health expenditure, but with the dominating influence of the former over that of the latter. Fourth, the defective nature of the African institutional environment receives further empirical validation. Lastly, some other auxiliary variables specific to each health surrogate are also acknowledged. On the policy ground, reducing carbon emissions and strengthening institutional environment hold the key to improving health and other health-related outcomes.
Healthy environment and quality health status are increasingly becoming compromised by both the developed and developing economies for rapid output growth. This is particularly so as there is an established direct link between economic growth and growth in energy consumption. This has invariably induced an increase in healthcare expenditure in order to ensure liveable and clean environment for continued human existence. The situation is particularly acute for most developing economies who do not have both technological and financial wherewithal to copy with the growing environmental menace. To this end, this study investigates the causal linkage between environmental quality and healthcare expenditure in 15 ECOWAS countries over the period 1995–2014. The empirical evidence is based on three estimators, viz pooled OLS, fixed effects and system GMM, respectively. For more specific policy targets, healthcare expenditure is further disaggregated into aggregate (national), public and private, respectively. From the empirical findings, carbon emission is found to exert a positive statistically significant impact on both public and national healthcare expenditure on the one hand, while no relationship seems to exist between environmental pollution and private healthcare expenditure on the other hand. On the policy front, we suggest that efforts should be intensified at reducing environmental degradation through introduction of carbon-free technology and other pollution abatement methods. The import of preceding statement comes into a full glare as positive income inelasticity of our result further reinforces necessity nature of the healthcare products.
A great majority of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) literature use CO emissions to proxy for environmental degradation. However, this is an important shortage in application of the EKC concept because environmental degradation cannot be captured by CO emissions only. By using a broader proxy, ecological footprint, this study aims to investigate the presence of environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis for the EU countries. The annual data from 1980 to 2013 is examined with second generation panel data methodologies which take into account the cross-sectional dependence among countries. The results show that there is U-shaped relationship between the real income and ecological footprint. In addition, non-renewable energy increases the environmental degradation while renewable energy and trade openness decrease the environmental degradation in the EU countries. Policy implications are further discussed.
This study reinvestigates empirically the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between environmental degradation and economic growth. The available EKC literature, in general, employs CO2 emissions as a proxy for environmental degradation. Unlike the current studies, this study employs the Ecological Footprint (EF hereafter) variable, instead of CO2 emissions, as an indicator of environmental deterioration. Then, this research observes the countries which are classified into three income groups in order to investigate EKC hypothesis. In conclusion, following the second generation panel data techniques, this paper reaches its best fitted model among the models of continuously updated fully modified CUP-FM) and continuously updated bias corrected (CUP-BC) models, and, reveals that EKC hypothesis is confirmed by low income, middle income and high income group countries’ data.
We investigate how foreign aid dampens the effects of terrorism on FDI using interactive quantile regressions. The empirical evidence is based on 78 developing countries for the period 1984-2008. Bilateral and multilateral aid variables are used, while terrorism dynamics entail: domestic, unclear, transnational and total number of terrorist attacks. The main finding is that foreign aid cannot be used as a policy tool to effectively address a hypothetically negative effect of terrorism on FDI. The positive threshold we cannot establish is important for policy makers because it communicates a cutoff point at which foreign aid completely neutralizes the negative effect of terrorism on FDI. From the conditioning information set, we also establish for the most part that the effects of GDP growth, infrastructural development and trade openness are an increasing function of FDI. Policy implications are discussed.
Results of a study of the cross-national determinants of the 2005 infant mortality rate for fifty-nine low and middle-income countries are reported here. We examined the empirical validity of four macro-social change theories: gender stratification theory, modernization theory, dependency/world-systems theory, and developmental state theory. We found strong support for gender stratification theory: female education had a negative effect on infant mortality. Support was also found for modernization theory: as industrialization increased , the infant mortality rate decreased. No support was found for developmental state theory and dependency/world-system theory. Several control variables were examined, but only Sub-Saharan Africa status proved to be an important predictor: Sub-Saharan African countries had a significantly higher infant mortality rate than their non Sub-Saharan African counterparts. Implications of the findings and suggestions for future research are briefly discussed .
This study investigates the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis by employing the ecological footprint (EF) as an indicator of environmental degradation in Qatar over the 1980–2011 period. The results of the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) estimation with structural breaks reveal that there is a long run relationship among the selected variables with a significant shift in the cointegration vector in 1996. The comparison of the short and long-run income elasticities indicates that the EKC hypothesis is not valid in Qatar. In particular, the long run effect of income is greater than its short run effect, which provides evidence of a monotonic relationship between EF and real GDP per capita. Moreover, the oil price and trade openness have a positive and negative long run impact on ecological footprint, respectively. We further investigate the robustness of the results by employing the Toda–Yamamoto causality tests and the estimation with regime approach. The outcome of TY shows that income and oil price increase significantly the ecological footprint. Moreover, the results of the estimation with two regimes (1980–1996 and 1997–2011) show that the impact of real GDP on the EF in the second regime is higher than the first regime, which confirm the ARDL estimation results.
Background:
Developing countries have witnessed economic growth as their GDP keeps increasing steadily over the years. The growth led to higher energy consumption which eventually leads to increase in air pollutions that pose a danger to human health. People's healthcare demand, in turn, increase due to the changes in the socioeconomic life and improvement in the health technology. This study is an attempt to investigate the impact of environmental quality on per capital health expenditure in 125 developing countries within a panel cointegration framework from 1995 to 2012.
Results:
We found out that a long-run relationship exists between per capita health expenditure and all explanatory variables as they were panel cointegrated. The explanatory variables were found to be statistically significant in explaining the per capita health expenditure. The result further revealed that CO2 has the highest explanatory power on the per capita health expenditure. The impact of the explanatory power of the variables is greater in the long-run compared to the short-run. Based on this result, we conclude that environmental quality is a powerful determinant of health expenditure in developing countries.
Conclusion:
Therefore, developing countries should as a matter of health care policy give provision of healthy air a priority via effective policy implementation on environmental management and control measures to lessen the pressure on health care expenditure. Moreover more environmental proxies with alternative methods should be considered in the future research.
Health is one important factor in the development of human capital. Good health will lead to increased levels of productivity. This study was conducted to examine the co-integration between environmental quality and socioeconomic factor for national health expenditure. This study used secondary data from the World Bank Indicators and the Department of Statistics in Malaysia. This analysis employs annual time series data on Health Expenditure (HE), Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Carbon Dioxide (CO2), Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) and Sulphur Dioxide (SO2) emission in metric tonnes per capita, Fertility Rate (FR) and Mortality Rate (MR) infant per 1,000 live births. The ARDL approach is used in order to explore the possibility of estimating both short and long run impacts of environmental quality. The study found that GDP, CO2, MR, FR, NO2 and SO2 could be treated as having a relationship with health expenditure in the long run in Malaysia. SO2, fertility and infant mortality rate showed a significant factor in the country's health expenditures affect substantially. The new generation is an important element in ensuring the continuance and sustainability of national development in the future.
The main objective of this study is to examine the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis by utilizing the ecological footprint as an environment indicator and GDP from tourism as the economic indicator. To achieve this goal, an environmental degradation model is established during the period of 1988-2008 for 144 countries. The results from the time series generalized method of moments (GMM) and the system panel GMM revealed that the number of countries that have a negative relationship between the ecological footprint and its determinants (GDP growth from tourism, energy consumption, trade openness, and urbanization) is more existent in the upper middle- and high-income countries. Moreover, the EKC hypothesis is more present in the upper middle- and high-income countries than the other income countries. From the outcome of this research, a number of policy recommendations were provided for the investigated countries.
Our aim here is to strengthen the links between the world-systems perspective and research on gender inequality. Grounding our analysis in theories assessing the connections between gender relationships and world-system processes, we empirically explore (1) the extent to which women's status in nations overlaps with the world-system position of those nations and (2) the influence of women's status within nations on a variety of national characteristics. We find that women's status has a moderately strong association with world-system position, which suggests that macro-comparative research may confound the respective effects on a variety of social characteristics of women's status and world-system position if indicators of both factors are not included in analyses. We also find that, controlling for world-system position, GDP per capita, and urbanization, in nations where women have higher status (variously measured), total fertility rates, infant mortality rates, military expenditures, and inflows of foreign direct investment are lower, and public health care expenditures and per capita meat consumption are higher. These results suggest that women's status likely has social effects that can be seen on the macro-level, and that world-systems analysts should pay more attention to theories of gender in their research.
For any developing nation, industrialization and CO2 emission goes hand-in-hand. Industrialization affects the CO2 emission level and consequently the pregnancy outcomes and hygienic states of children. Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis ensures the interaction between income level and environmental degradation. Based on this foundation, causal relationships between industrialization, CO2 emission and mortality rates for India has been obtained in this paper. For empirical analysis, data for the parameters under consideration over the period 1971-2010 has been considered. Vector Error Correction model using lag-augmented VAR model has been employed for the analysis. Bidirectional causal associations have been found between changes in infant mortality rate and growth in CO2 emission, and between growth in gross capital formation and changes in child mortality rate, respectively. In both the cases, it has been found that growth in industrialization is causing rise in CO2 emission. The result obtained is new in the considering the existing body of literature.
This paper examines the impact of health expenditures on agricultural labour productivity in order to inform the necessary policy decisions about targeting scarce public resources towards their most effective uses. We link health sector expenditures in rural Tanzania to health outcomes and agricultural labour productivity using data from the 2008 Household Budget Survey (10,975 households) and the 2007/08 Agricultural Census (52,594 households) across 113 districts in Tanzania. The results indicate that the marginal productivity of labour as well as land and fertilisers respond significantly to health expenditures. However, the magnitude of the response varies across types of disease, categories of expenditures and agricultural inputs. These findings suggest both the need and scope for targeting public expenditures in the health sector to achieve better agricultural growth outcomes.
In studying the links between income and mortality we need to recognise two key hypotheses. In the absolute income hypothesis, the higher an individual income, the lower the risk of mortality. In the relative income hypothesis, the individual's health is additionally affected by the distribution of income within society so that living in a place with grossly unequal income distribution is anticipated to lead to a worse health experience (see Chapter 5 of this volume). This chapter attempts to review the evidence for the importance of both these hypotheses using data from the UK- representative Health and Lifestyle Survey employing both individual and ecological measures of income.
,,,,,,,
. In conclusion, there appears to be evidence that mortality outcomes cannot be simply reduced to individual characteristics. There is an ecology of mortality that is related to the mean income of the local area. Mortality is related to poverty at both the household and area level. It seems to us that such results for mortality at least can support a materialist explanation without any specific need to develop explanations based on psychosocial processes, social cohesiveness or social capital.
Objective
We aimed to quantify the relationship between national income and infant and under-five mortality in developing countries.Design We conducted a systematic literature search of studies that examined the relationship between income and child mortality (infant and/or under-five mortality) and meta-analysed their results.Setting Developing countries.Main outcome measuresChild mortality (infant and /or under-five mortality).ResultsThe systematic literature search identified 24 studies, which produced 38 estimates that examined the impact of income on the mortality rates. Using meta-analysis, we produced pooled estimates of the relationship between income and mortality. The pooled estimate of the relationship between income and infant mortality before adjusting for covariates is -0.95 (95% CI -1.34 to -0.57) and that for under-five mortality is -0.45 (95% CI -0.79 to -0.11). After adjusting for covariates, pooled estimate of the relationship between income and infant mortality is -0.33 (-0.39 to -0.26) while the estimate for under-five mortality is -0.28 (-0.37 to -0.19). If a country has an infant mortality of 50 per 1000 live births and the gross domestic product per capita purchasing power parity increases by 10%, the infant mortality will decrease to 45 per 1000 live births.Conclusion
Income is an important determinant of child survival and this work provides a pooled estimate for the relationship.
This article examines three relevant hypotheses on the effect of health worker migration on human development and economic prosperity (at the macro- and micro-levels) in Africa. Owing to the lack of relevant data on health human resource (HHR) migration for the continent, the subject matter has remained empirically void over the last decades despite the acute concern about health professional emigration. Using quantile regression, the following findings have been established. (1) The effect of HHR emigration is positive (negative) at low (high) levels of economic growth. (2) HHR emigration improves (mitigates) human development (GDP per capita growth) in low (high) quantiles of the distribution. (3) Specific differences in effects are found in top quantiles of human development and low quantiles of GDP per capita growth where the physician (nurse) emigration elasticities of development are positive (negative) and negative (positive), respectively. As a policy implication, blanket health-worker emigration control policies are unlikely to succeed across countries with different levels of human development and economic prosperity. Hence, the policies should be contingent on the prevailing levels of development and tailored differently across the most and least developed African countries.
Corruption is thought to prevent poor countries from catching up with richer ones. We analyze one channel through which corruption
hampers growth: public investment can be distorted in favor of specific types of spending for which rent-seeking is easier
and better concealed. To study this distortion, we propose a dynamic model where households vote for the composition of public
spending, subject to an incentive constraint reflecting individuals’ choice between productive activity and rent-seeking.
In equilibrium, the structure of public investment is determined by the predatory technology and the distribution of political
power. Among different regimes, the model shows a possible scenario of distortion without corruption in which there is no
effective corruption but the possibility of corruption still distorts the allocation of public investment. We test the implications
of the model on a set of countries using a two-stage least squares estimation. We find that developing countries with high
predatory technology invest more in housing and physical capital in comparison with health and education. The reverse is true
for developed countries.
The literature on health systems focuses largely on the performance of healthcare systems operationalised around indicators such as hospital beds, maternity care and immunisation coverage. A broader definition of health systems however, needs to include the wider determinants of health including, possibly, governance and its relationship to health and health equity. The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between health systems outcomes and equity, and governance as a part of a process to extend the range of indicators used to assess health systems performance.
Using cross sectional data from 46 countries in the African region of the World Health Organization, an ecological analysis was conducted to examine the relationship between governance and health systems performance. The data were analysed using multiple linear regression and a standard progressive modelling procedure. The under-five mortality rate (U5MR) was used as the health outcome measure and the ratio of U5MR in the wealthiest and poorest quintiles was used as the measure of health equity. Governance was measured using two contextually relevant indices developed by the Mo Ibrahim Foundation.
Governance was strongly associated with U5MR and moderately associated with the U5MR quintile ratio. After controlling for possible confounding by healthcare, finance, education, and water and sanitation, governance remained significantly associated with U5MR. Governance was not, however, significantly associated with equity in U5MR outcomes.
This study suggests that the quality of governance may be an important structural determinant of health systems performance, and could be an indicator to be monitored. The association suggests there might be a causal relationship. However, the cross-sectional design, the level of missing data, and the small sample size, forces tentative conclusions. Further research will be needed to assess the causal relationship, and its generalizability beyond U5MR as a health outcome measure, as well as the geographical generalizability of the results.
The authors of this excellent text define social epidemiology as the epidemiologic study of the social distribution and social determinants of states of health, implying that the aim is to identify socio-environmental exposures which may be related to a broad range of physical and mental health outcomes. In the first systematic account of this field, they focus on methodological approaches but draw widely from related disciplines such as sociology, psychology, physiology, and medicine in the effort to develop and evaluate testable hypotheses about the pathways between social conditions and health. The persistent patterns of social inequalities in health make this a timely publication.
This paper examines the conditioning role of institutions in environment-health outcomes nexus in African for a period spanning from 1996 to 2016. The following findings are established using a panel system GMM estimator. First, the unqualified influence of carbon emission on health outcomes is found to be positive and significant statistically. Specifically, it affects human life longevity negatively but positively increases infant deaths and healthcare spending. Second, institutional dysfunctions have an unconditional negative and significant effect on health outcomes. Unambiguously, low regulatory quality and government ineffectiveness weaken life expectancy and amplify the number of infant deaths, while poor corruption control unrestrictedly affects healthcare expenses. Third, the marginal impact of interactions between carbon emission and institutions on life longevity is negative but positive for infant mortality and health expenditure. Lastly, the corresponding net effects of the interaction between environmental pollutants and institutions are equally negative on life expectancy while positive on infant mortality and health expenditure. It means that institutions do not play a supportive role in ameliorating the negative effect of environmental degradation on health outcomes. Thus, strengthening regulatory control, government effectiveness and control of corruption hold the impetus to ensuring environmental balance and improving healthy living and other health-related outcomes.
Asks: is there a future for the political economy of development? The scientific status of the political economy of development, never much to begin with, has shrunk to vanishing point. For expositional convenience classifies approaches to the political economy of development into two categories, namely the neo-classical and the neo-Marxist. -from Author
Social epidemiology, as defined by the textbook of the same name (Berkman et al., 2014) is "that branch of epidemiology concerned with the way that social structures, institutions, and relationships influence health" (p. 2). As our Special Issue commemorates the 50th anniversary of Social Science & Medicine, it is worth noting that the Social Epidemiology office within the journal has existed only for a fraction of that time (fifteen years). So what has been learned in the fifteen years since the establishment of the new office? In this commentary, we spotlight some of the achievements, substantive topics, and future trends in the research papers that we have featured in our Section of the journal.
Reducing the impact of air pollution and global environmental
degradation on human health and quality of life for Qatari citizens
represents the most important objective of the Qatar National vision
2030. With respect to this vision, this study investigates the effects of
economic growth, energy consumption, trade openness, urbanization and
financial development on environmental degradation by using the Markov
Switching Equilibrium Correction Model with shifts in both the intercept
and income per capita slope for the period 1970-2015. Unlike existing
studies and in addition to the CO2 emissions pollutant, this paper uses
the total Ecological Footprint and Ecological Carbon Footprint as a new
proxies of environmental degradation.
Empirical results show strong evidence for cointegration with Markov
shifts. In particular, our results show that the non-control for breaks
can hidden the true relationship among variables. The results show also
that when controlling for breaks the Environment Kuznets curve (EKC)
hypothesis holds for the CO2 emissions and Ecological carbon Footprint
pollutants and the U-shaped behavior holds for the total Ecological
Footprint. Moreover, the results show that these two behaviors (EKC and
U-shaped) are regimes dependent. Regarding the other explanatory
variables, the results show that trade openness and urbanization worsen
Ecological Footprint. However, the electricity consumption and financial
development are positively related to the Ecological Footprint and
negatively related to Ecological Carbon Footprint and CO2 emissions.
Finally, we found evidence for the growth hypothesis for both pollutants.
Based on these results, a detailed economic, energy and environmental
policies are proposed and discussed for the case of Qatar.
This paper explores the validity of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) using two different environment indicators: the carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) and the ecological footprint (EF) in Qatar over the 1980–2011 period. To this end, we investigate the impact of real gross domestic product (RGDP), the square of RGDP, the energy use, the financial development and the trade openness on the CO2 emissions and the EF. We employ the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model with the presence of unknown structural breaks in order to study short-run and long-run elasticity between the variables. The findings infer that there is a long-run relationship among the selected variables with a shift in the cointegration vector in 1991 and 2000. The empirical result indicates that the inverted U-shaped hypothesis is not valid in Qatar when we use the CO2 emissions, whereas the inverted U-shaped held when using the EF. Furthermore, the error correction results confirm that the convergence towards the long-run equilibrium will mostly occur within one year after a short run shock. Generally, the findings suggest that Qatar should invest more in efficient energy and continue sustained its growth. Moreover, more efforts are needed for diversification particularly in technology-intensive and environment-friendly industries to improve environmental quality.
This paper empirically examines the determinants of child health in developing countries and how public policy may interact with these determinants. It improves on previous empirical studies by conducting a more careful analysis of the determinants controlling for possible endogeneity, and by using a more comprehensive and richer panel dataset, drawing on a health database covering 136 countries over 1960–2005, supplemented by the latest World Development Indicators dataset as well as data on a broad variety of alternative indicators of governance, such as those from the International Country Risk Guide and the Open Budget Index. We find that both public spending on healthcare and the quality of governance matter for the reduction of child mortality rates. However, our mixed results on the interaction of governance with public spending throw some doubt on the conclusiveness of previous empirical studies.
This study examines ways that political processes influence the provision of basic human needs once the effects of aggregate national wealth are removed. Three general explanatory approaches are examined. These are based on the size or strength of the national government, the achievement of democratic processes, and the ideological orientation of ruling elites along a left-right dimension. These three approaches are analyzed by regressing an index of physical well-being, the PQLI, on measures drawn from each perspective for a sample of 116 contemporary nations. The findings indicate that political attributes do indeed have an impact on the provision of basic needs even when controlling for aggregate social wealth. Democratic processes are related to positive welfare outcomes irrespective of state strength and ideological norms. For regimes with a roughly centrist ideology, state strength appears to make little noticeable difference one way or another; for those on the left, state strength promotes welfare performance; for those on the right, state strength is found to inhibit the provision of basic needs.
The use of principal components in regression has received a lot of attention in the literature in the past few years, and the topic is now beginning to appear in textbooks. Along with the use of principal component regression there appears to have been a growth in the misconception that the principal components with small eigenvalues will very rarely be of any use in regression. The purpose of this note is to demonstrate that these components can be as important as those with large variance. This is illustrated with four examples, three of which have already appeared in the literature.
As early as 1985, Rosenfield and Maine began to look at what is called the maternal child field (MCH). More than two decades later, maternal and infant mortality is still among the worst performing health indicator in resource-poor countries and regions, and it has barely changed since 1990. Although three of the eight United Nations Millennium Development Goals aim at reducing child mortality, maternal mortality, and promoting gender equality, most literature in the field is either clinical or exclusively deals with women’s health problems. In this study, I proposed an empirical model that tests the impact of gender equality, women’s human rights, and maternity care on MCH with economic and political development as background factors. The proposed model was tested by using structural equation analysis. Data were obtained from 137 developing countries. The proposed model is partially supported by the data. Empirical findings demonstrate that gender equality has a pivotal role to play in the promotion of MCH. The relationship between MCH and maternity care is found to be strong and statistically significant. This finding may permit a probable verification given the current social conditions in some developing countries, particularly the neglect of many of women’s health needs and the assignment of their primary responsibilities in childrearing. The women’s human rights hypothesis is not supported by the data. It is perhaps that human rights instruments provide a legal discourse for political functions and social welfare issues, but that the legal approach alone does not necessarily provide a moral and social foundation to ensure the implementation of social welfare and human well-being, particularly maternal and child health in developing countries. The findings also indicate the importance of economic development in predicting maternity care. Finally, a positive and statistically significant relationship is found between economic development and gender equality. Implications and limitations of the study are discussed.
The national ecological footprint of both consumption and production are significantly spatially autocorrelated at global level. This violates the assumption of independently distributed errors of most conventional estimation techniques. Using a spatial econometric approach, this paper re-examine the relationship between economic growth and environmental impact for indicator of ecological footprint. The results do not show evidence of inverted U-shape Environmental Kuznets Curve. The domestic ecological footprint of consumption (or production) was obviously influenced by the ecological footprint of consumption (or production), income and biocapacity in neighborhood countries. We also found that the consumption footprint is more sensitive to domestic income, while production footprint is more sensitive to domestic biocapacity, which is often unnoticed in EKC hypothesis analyses that focus exclusively on the consumption-based or production-based indictors.
Drawing from various bodies of social scientific literature and research, the authors assess the extent to which infant and child mortality rates in less-developed countries are affected by the percent of domestic populations living in urban slum conditions. Results of first-difference panel model estimates of 80 less-developed countries from 1990 to 2005 indicate that growth in the percent of populations living in urban slum conditions positively affects both forms of mortality, and the effects are much more pronounced for African countries than for less-developed countries in Latin America and Asia. These findings hold, net of economic development, fertility rates, world-economic integration, and other factors. Cross-sectional analyses of infant and child mortality rates in 2005 that include additional controls provide further evidence of the mortality/urban slum relationships found in the panel model estimates. The authors conclude by highlighting the theoretical implications of the results and describe the next steps in this research agenda.
Health Expenditure has been rising faster than the growth of income in most industrial countries. The objective of this paper is to discover what factors determined Health Expenditure per head of population in the G7 Countries and whether governments could control them. The analysis has identified three factors that affect Health Expenditure positively: income per head, the ageing population and the share of public expenditure on GDP. None of these variables can be controlled by the government for the sole purpose of containing the growth of Health Care Expenditure. Therefore, only reform of national Health Service Systems could effectively contain the growth of Health Spending. The reforms introduced by some countries in the early 1990s had no significant effect on cost containment with the result that health care expenditure continued to rise in some faster than before. The exception is Japan which managed to achieve a significant downturn in the growth of health expenditure.
This paper examines the relationship between country health spending and selected health outcomes (infant mortality and child mortality), using data from 133 low and middle-income countries for the years 1995, 2000, 2005, and 2006. Health spending has a significant effect on reducing infant and under-5 child mortality with an elasticity of 0.13 to 0.33 for infant mortality and 0.15 to 0.38 for under-5 child mortality in models estimated using fixed effects methods (depending on models employed). Government health spending also has a significant effect on reducing infant and child mortality and the size of the coefficient depends on the level of good governance achieved by the country, indicating that good governance increases the effectiveness of health spending. This paper contributes to the new evidence pointing to the importance of investing in health care services and the importance of governance in improving health outcomes.
Many cross?national studies of child and infant mortality emphasize predictors linked to modernization theory, such as economic development level as measured by GNI (gross national income) or GDP (gross domestic product) per capita. However, much less research considers the effects of social inequality on child mortality. This paper relies on four theoretical frameworks. In addition to modernization theory, it assesses the social democratic theory, the class stratification theory, and the gender stratification theory by examining the effects of state commitment to health care, class inequality, and gender inequality on child mortality. The findings demonstrate some support for each of the theories. Along with economic development, state commitment to health care, class inequality, and gender inequality demonstrate significant direct effects on child mortality in LDCs (less developed countries). In addition, economic development has a significant indirect effect on child mortality via state commitment to health care and gender inequality, but not via class inequality.
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The authors conduct a cross-national analysis that seeks to accomplish two important goals. First, they test dependency theory’s hypotheses that World Bank structural adjustment adversely affects child mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa. Second, they empirically evaluate the effect of access to clean water and basic sanitation on child mortality. In doing so, they use two-way fixed effects regression models to analyze child mortality using data on 31 nations and four time points (1990, 1995, 2000, and 2005). They find substantial support for their first goal relating to dependency theory that when a Sub-Saharan African nation is under a World Bank structural adjustment loan, then it tends to have higher levels of child mortality. They also find support for their second goal concerning the importance of including environmental variables in cross-national research on health. Specifically, they find that higher levels of access to an improved water source and an improved sanitation facility are associated with lower levels of child mortality within Sub-Saharan African nations. The authors conclude by discussing the findings, theoretical implications, methodological implications, policy suggestions, and possible directions for future research.
This article examines recent Chinese efforts to construct a series of official economic cooperation zones in Africa. These zones are a central platform in China's announced strategy of engagement in Africa as ‘mutual benefit’. We analyse the background, motives and implementation of the zones, and argue that they form a unique, experimental model of development cooperation in Africa: market-based decisions and investment by Chinese companies are combined with support and subsidies from an Asian ‘developmental state’. Though this cooperation provides a promising new approach to sustainable industrialisation, we also identify serious political, economic and social challenges. Inadequate local learning and local participation could affect the ability of the zones to catalyse African industrialisation. The synergy between Chinese enterprises, the Chinese government and African governments has been evolving through practice. A case study of Egypt provides insight into this learning process.
We examine the impact of three "criteria" air pollutants on infant health in New Jersey in the 1990s by combining information about mother's residential location from birth certificates with information from air quality monitors. Our work offers three important innovations. First, we use the exact addresses of mothers to select those closest to air monitors to improve the accuracy of air quality exposure. Second, we include maternal fixed effects to control for unobserved characteristics of mothers. Third, we examine interactions of air pollution with smoking and other risk factors for poor infant health outcomes. We find consistently negative effects of exposure to carbon monoxide (CO), both during and after birth, with effects considerably larger for smokers and older mothers. Since automobiles are the main source of carbon monoxide emissions, our results have important implications for regulation of automobile emissions.
The infant mortality rate varies widely across theless developed countries. Five macro-social changetheories exist that can explain the variation of theinfant mortality rate across the less developedcountries: modernization theory,dependency/world-systems theory, gender stratificationtheory, economic disarticulation theory, anddevelopmental state theory. Although research supportsthe claims of each theoretical narrative, no singlestudy examines all five narratives simultaneously oris based on recent data. The purpose of the researchreported here was to fill this gap in the literatureby examining the simultaneous effects ofindustrialization, four alternative measures ofeconomic dependence, female educational attainment,economic disarticulation, state strength, and acontrol variable, Sub-Saharan African status, on theinfant mortality rate for 59 less developed countriesin 1991. Results of eight tests of the fivetheoretical narratives indicate thatindustrialization, state strength, and three of thefour measures of economic dependence have little neteffect on infant mortality, whereas economicdisarticulation, female education, debt dependence,and Sub-Saharan African status have the expectedeffects on infant mortality. Theoretical and policyimplications of the results are briefly discussed.
In this paper we examine the role of environmental quality in determining per capita health expenditures. We take a panel cointegration approach in order to explore the possibility of estimating both short-run and long-run impacts of environmental quality. Our empirical analysis is based on eight OECD countries, namely Austria, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK for the period 1980–1999. We find that per capita health expenditure, per capita income, carbon monoxide emissions, sulphur oxide emissions and nitrogen oxide emissions are panel cointegrated. While short-run elasticities reveal that income and carbon monoxide emissions exert a statistically significant positive effect on health expenditures, in the long-run in addition to income and carbon monoxide, we find that sulphur oxide emissions have a statistically significant positive impact on health expenditures.
This paper studies the links between public spending, governance, and outcomes. We examine the role of governance–measured by the level of corruption and the quality of bureaucracy–in determining the efficacy of public spending in improving human development outcomes. Our analysis contributes to our understanding of the relationship between public spending, governance and outcomes, and helps explain the surprising result that public spending often does not yield the expected improvement in outcomes. We show empirically that the differences in the efficacy of public spending can be largely explained by the quality of governance. Public health spending lowers child mortality rates more in countries with good governance. Similarly, public spending on primary education becomes more effective in increasing primary education attainment in countries with good governance. More generally, public spending has virtually no impact on health and education outcomes in poorly governed countries. These findings have important implications for enhancing the development effectiveness of public spending. The lessons are particularly relevant for developing countries, where public spending on education and health is relatively low, and the state of governance is often poor.
Research on the social determinants of health has often considered education and economic resources as separate indicators of socioeconomic status. From a policy perspective, however, it is important to understand the relative strength of the effect of these social factors on health outcomes, particularly in developing countries. It is also important to examine not only the impact of education and economic resources of individuals, but also whether community and country levels of these factors affect health outcomes. This analysis uses multilevel regression models to assess the relative effects of education and economic resources on infant mortality at the family, community, and country level using data from demographic and Health Surveys in 43 low-and lower-middle-income countries. We find strong effects for both per capita gross national income and completed secondary education at the country level, but a greater impact of education within families and communities.
We test whether mortality is related to individual income, mean community income, and community income inequality, controlling for initial health status and personal characteristics. The analysis is based on a random sample from the adult Swedish population of more than 40,000 individuals who were followed up for 10–17 years. We find that mortality decreases significantly as individual income increases. For mean community income and community income inequality we cannot, however, reject the null hypothesis of no effect on mortality. This result is stable with respect to a number of measurement and specification issues explored in an extensive sensitivity analysis.
An essential ingredient in the evaluation of policies concerning health services is knowledge of the impact of health services and other factors on the health of the population. One method of obtaining this information is from the regression analysis of international cross-section data on mortality rates, health service provision, income levels, consumption patterns, and other variables hypothesised to affect population health. The investigation of the determinants of population health is in many ways akin to the estimation of production functions which describe the relationship between the output of goods or services and the mix of inputs used in their production. The purpose of our paper is to use this analogy to discuss, and provide examples of, the problems which arise with the statistical investigation of mortality rates. Issues raised include simultaneous equation bias, multicollinearity, selection of explanatory variables, omitted variable bias, definition and measurement of variables, functional forms, lagged relationships and temporal stability. These problems are illustrated by replication and re-analysis, using new data, of the well known study by Cochrane, St Leger and Moore.