The Causal Nexus among Energy Consumption, Environmental Degradation, Financial Development and Health Outcome: Empirical Study for Pakistan

Weal M.Gh. M. Arafat, Ihtisham ul Haq, Bahtiyar Mehmed, Azeem Abbas, Sisira Kumara Naradda Gamage and Oruj Gasimli
Additional contact information
Weal M.Gh. M. Arafat: College of Economics and Trade, Hunan University, Changsha 410079, China
Ihtisham ul Haq: Department of Economics, Kohat University of Science and Technology, Kohat 26000, KP, Pakistan
Bahtiyar Mehmed: Department of Economics, Neusoft Institute Guangdong, Foshan 528225, China
Azeem Abbas: Department of Economics, Kohat University of Science and Technology, Kohat 26000, KP, Pakistan
Sisira Kumara Naradda Gamage: Department of Economics, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Rajarata University of Sri Lanka, Mihintale 50300, Sri Lanka
Oruj Gasimli: College of Economics and Trade, Hunan University, Changsha 410079, China

Energies, 2022, vol. 15, issue 5, 1-20

Abstract: Pakistan is facing an energy crisis and is also severely affected by climate change. Moreover, Pakistan is not doing well as far as health outcome indicators are concerned. The causal nexus among energy, environment, and health outcomes is well-established in literature. Besides, financial development also grabs the attention of health outcome literature as financial development can play a significant role in improving health outcomes. Thus, this study was conducted to test the causal nexus among energy consumption, environmental degradation, financial development, and health outcomes in the case of Pakistan. This study proxies health outcomes with life expectancy and infant mortality. Time series data have been analyzed through different econometric techniques, such as unit root tests, cointegration techniques, causality techniques, and cointegration regressions. Moreover, this study not just discovers the causal direction among variables but also determines the strength of causality through variance decomposition. Results of the study confirm that all variables of the study are cointegrated in the long run. The causality analysis reveals that unidirectional causality is running from energy consumption and environmental degradation to health outcomes, whereas bidirectional causality is found between financial development and health outcomes in the long run. Besides, this study also determines the effect of energy, environmental degradation, and financial development in the health outcome model and finds that energy and financial development can help Pakistan to improve health outcomes. Policy implications are recommended for Pakistan.

Keywords: energy consumption; financial development; health outcome; environmental degradation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/15/5/1859/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/15/5/1859/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:15:y:2022:i:5:p:1859-:d:763009

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().