Exploring the Roles of Renewable Energy, Education Spending, and CO 2 Emissions towards Health Spending in South Asian Countries

Usman Mehmood, Ephraim Bonah Agyekum, Salah Kamel, Hossein Shahinzadeh and Ata Jahangir Moshayedi
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Usman Mehmood: Department of Political Science, University of Management and Technology, Lahore 54770, Pakistan
Ephraim Bonah Agyekum: Department of Nuclear and Renewable Energy, Ural Federal University Named after the First President of Russia Boris Yeltsin, 620002 Ekaterinburg, Russia
Salah Kamel: Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Aswan University, Aswan 81542, Egypt
Hossein Shahinzadeh: Smart Microgrid Research Center, Najafabad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Najafabad 85141-43131, Iran
Ata Jahangir Moshayedi: School of Information Engineering, Jiangxi University of Science and Technology, Ganzhou 341000, China

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 6, 1-10

Abstract: This research is mainly aimed at determining the effect of renewable energy (RE), education expenditures, and CO 2 emissions on health expenditures in selected South Asian countries. There is an insufficient number of studies that investigate the linkages between health expenditures (HE) and CO 2 emissions in South Asian countries. This study combined RE and gross domestic product (GDP) to identify their effect on health spending. We utilized the annual data of 1990–2018, and applied FMOLS and DOLS estimators over the panel data of five South Asian countries. According to the DOLS and FMOLS long-run results, GDP, RE, and education expenditures are negatively associated with health expenditures. This suggests that renewable energy puts less pressure on environmental quality, which leads to less health spending in the five South Asian countries studied. The empirical results also show that HE and CO 2 emissions are positively and significantly related, which implies that an increase in CO 2 emissions increases the financial burden on the various countries’ health sector. This study, therefore, recommends the usage of renewable sources to improve public health and to help lower health expenditures. To achieve sustainable development, it is also important to increase investment in the educational sector in the various countries.

Keywords: health expenditures; CO 2 emissions; renewable energy; South Asian countries; FMOLS (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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