Environmental quality and health expenditures efficiency in Türkiye: the role of natural resources.

The environmental pollution caused by climate change and global warming pose significant risks to health. This raises the question how environmental disturbances can affect health expenditures. Based on this, this study examines the asymmetric effect of environmental quality on health expenditures in Türkiye using the non-linear ARDL (NARDL) model for the 1975-2019 period. In addition to environmental quality, natural resources, economic growth, and trade openness variables are also included in the health expenditure model. The findings support the existence of an asymmetric cointegration relationship between the series. The findings also indicate that positive environmental pollution shocks affect health expenditures positively in the long run, while negative environmental pollution shocks do not have a statistically significant effect on health expenditures. Positive and negative natural resource shocks affect health expenditures negatively in the long run. Despite the effect of positive economic growth shocks on health expenditures is positive but statistically insignificant, the effect of negative economic growth shocks is positive and significant. Besides, positive trade openness shocks have a negative effect on health expenditures and negative trade openness shocks have a positive effect. The findings prove that the steps to be taken to protect the environment in the current period will increase the effectiveness of health expenditures in the future. This situation has a guiding feature for policy-makers in terms of policy decisions.

The effects of economic globalization and productivity on environmental quality: evidence from newly industrialized countries.

Newly industrialized countries (NICs) have become important contributors of the global environmental deterioration in line with the increases in their share in global output. Exerted efforts towards increasing welfare through global integration and increased productivity have sometimes come at the cost of worsened environmental quality in most of the countries. This study employs augmented mean group (AMG) estimator and investigates the effects of economic globalization, human capital, gross capital formation, and total factor productivity on ecological footprint (EFP) in 11 NICs from 1975 to 2017. The study also contains bootstrap causality tests to obtain causal inference. Empirical results reveal that economic globalization and human capital are negatively correlated with EFP, while GDP per capita manifests a positive and highly significant relationship with EFP. Unit percentage increases in economic globalization index and human capital are found to create .17% and .39% reduction in ecological footprint, respectively. On the contrary, a percentage increase in total factor productivity creates .13% increase in EFP. Estimation results support the pollution halo hypothesis for 11 NICs and confirm the positive effect of human capital on the environment and expose the adverse effects of inadequate regulation. In terms of causality analysis, results reveal unidirectional causality relationships (i) from economic globalization to EFP, (ii) from GDP per capita to EFP, (iii) from trade openness to EFP and from EFP to total factor productivity. Human capital and EFP are found to be in bidirectional causal relationship. The study underlines the importance of global integration and human capital as they are negatively correlated with and causally linked to EFP. Policies that undermine the global economic integration and neglect effective regulations are expected to further aggravate environmental problems in NICs.