Department of Economics and Business, Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Oradea, 410087 Oradea, Romania.
Faculty of Medicine, Iuliu Hatieganu University of Medicine and Pharmacy, 400012 Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2019 Dec 14;16(24):5115. doi: 10.3390/ijerph16245115.
National and global health policies are increasingly recognizing the key role of the environment in human health development, which is related to its economic and social determinants, such as income level, technical progress, education, quality of jobs, inequality, education or lifestyle. Research has shown that the increase of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) per capita can provide additional funds for health but also for environmental protection. However, often, economic growth is associated with the accelerated degradation of the environment, and this in turn will result in an exponential increase in harmful emissions and will implicitly determine the increasing occurrence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), mainly cardiovascular diseases, cancers and respiratory diseases. In this paper, we investigate the role and effects of economic growth, environmental pollution and non-communicable diseases on health expenditures, for the case of EU (European Union) countries during 2000-2014. In order to investigate the long-term and the short-term relationship between them, we have employed the Panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) method. Using the Pedroni-Johansen cointegration methods, we found that the variables are cointegrated. The findings of this study show that economic growth is one of the most important factors influencing the health expenditures both in the long- and short-run in all the 28 EU countries. With regards to the influence of CO emissions on health expenditure, we have found a negative impact in the short-run and a positive impact on the long-run. We have also introduced an interaction between NCDs and environmental expenditure as independent variable, a product variable. Finally, we have found that in all the three estimated models, the variation in environmental expenditure produces changes in NCDs' effect on health expenditure.
国家和全球卫生政策越来越认识到环境在人类健康发展中的关键作用，这与收入水平、技术进步、教育、工作质量、不平等、教育或生活方式等经济和社会决定因素有关。研究表明，人均国内生产总值（GDP）的增长可以为卫生保健提供额外资金，也可以为环境保护提供额外资金。然而，经济增长往往伴随着环境的加速恶化，这反过来又会导致有害排放的指数级增长，并将隐含地决定非传染性疾病（NCDs）的发生率不断增加，主要是心血管疾病、癌症和呼吸道疾病。在本文中，我们研究了经济增长、环境污染和非传染性疾病对卫生支出的作用和影响，以 2000-2014 年欧盟（EU）国家为例。为了研究它们之间的长期和短期关系，我们采用了面板自回归分布滞后（ARDL）方法。使用 Pedroni-Johansen 协整方法，我们发现变量是协整的。本研究的结果表明，经济增长是影响所有 28 个欧盟国家卫生支出的最重要因素之一，无论是在长期还是短期。关于 CO 排放对卫生支出的影响，我们发现短期有负面影响，长期有正面影响。我们还引入了一个独立变量，即环境支出与非传染性疾病之间的交互作用，这是一个产品变量。最后，我们发现，在所有三个估计模型中，环境支出的变化都会对非传染性疾病对卫生支出的影响产生变化。
