 Empirical analysis of associations between health expenditure and forest environments: A case of JapanKei Kabaya Ecological Economics, 2021, vol. 181, issue C Abstract: Surrounding natural environments, especially green space and forests, are considered beneficial to our physical and psychological health. Nevertheless, their contributions to our health expenditure are limitedly investigated in the literature to date. The goal of this paper is to explore associations between health spending and forest environments at the prefectural level in Japan. Fully considering cross-sectional dependence and non-stationarity of the variables, my empirical analysis revealed that mixed forest coverage and urban-forest proximity would have significantly inverse long-run effects on per capita health expenditure. These findings would support current domestic forest policies from public health perspectives. Whereas, no empirical evidences of the short-run health impacts of these forest indicators were found in this study. Also, other forest indicators, i.e. overall, evergreen and deciduous forest coverage as well as regional vegetation diversity, were found to be insignificant in determining health expenditure. Keywords: Forest coverage; Forest diversity; Forest proximity; Health expenditure; Cross-sectional dependence; Cointegration (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:181:y:2021:i:c:s0921800920322187 DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2020.106927 Access Statistics for this article Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier |
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