Lingnan College, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China.
Centre for Global Food and Resources, School of Economics and Public Policy, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA 5000, Australia.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2023 Feb 9;20(4):3037. doi: 10.3390/ijerph20043037.
Ecological management has been implemented to improve individual well-being. However, it remains unclear whether this management has improved health inequality over time. Aiming to examine whether health inequality is caused by ecological management in China, we harnessed a macro-level dataset from 2001 to 2019 across 31 Chinese provinces-combined with gene and dietary culture data-and utilized a bilateral approach to pair provincial data. Empirical results of system Generalized Method of Moments (sys-GMM) estimations in benchmark and extensive models which suggest a negative and statistically significant causal effect of ecological management on health inequality. Specifically, ecological management contributes to decreasing the inequality in the population death rate, the death rate among pregnant women, the underweight newborn rate, the child malnutrition rate, and the infectious disease mortality. The results are robust to weak instruments in the sys-GMM setting and a delayed effect of ecological management. Additionally, the heterogeneity analysis shows that the causal effect of ecological management on decreasing regional health inequality is more significant and higher for subsamples in identical regions than in different regions.
生态管理已被实施以提高个体福祉。然而，目前尚不清楚这种管理是否随着时间的推移改善了健康不平等状况。为了检验中国的生态管理是否导致了健康不平等，我们利用了一个从 2001 年到 2019 年的中国 31 个省级别的宏观数据集——结合基因和饮食文化数据——并采用双边方法对省级数据进行配对。基于系统广义矩估计（sys-GMM）的基准和扩展模型的实证结果表明，生态管理对健康不平等具有负向且具有统计学意义的因果效应。具体来说，生态管理有助于降低人口死亡率、孕妇死亡率、新生儿体重不足率、儿童营养不良率和传染病死亡率的不平等程度。在 sys-GMM 设定中存在弱工具变量和生态管理的滞后效应的情况下，结果仍然稳健。此外，异质性分析表明，生态管理对降低区域健康不平等的因果效应在相同地区的子样本中比在不同地区的子样本中更为显著和更高。
