Health Damage of Air Pollution, Governance Uncertainty and Economic Growth

Abstract

The evaluation of environmental and health governance processes is an important part of the innovation and perfection of modern governance systems. Based on the macropanel samples, this paper analyzes the impact of the health damage caused by air pollution (APHD) on economic growth and the related mechanisms accordingly using the moderate model and the threshold model. The results can be concluded as follows: (1) After locking in the health damage perspective, the APHD has a negative impact on economic growth. When other conditions are met, economic growth will significantly drop by 1.233 percent for each unit increase in the APHD index. (2) There is a moderate effect of governance uncertainty in APHD on economic growth with different characteristics. The combination of governance uncertainty and APHD can significantly inhibit economic growth, and this moderating effect has different impacts due to heterogeneous conditions. Spatially, this inhibitory effect is significantly obvious in the eastern, central, and western regions, while the negative effect is significant in areas north of the Huai River with medium and low self-defense ability. Additionally, compared with the delegating of governance power at the municipal level, when the governance power is delegated at the county level, the interaction between the governance uncertainty constructed by income fiscal decentralization and APHD has a less negative economic effect. (3) There is a threshold effect under the conditions of a low level of decentralization of prevention and control, a high level of investment in governance, and a low level of APHD. However, under the condition of a certain APHD level, when the decentralization level of pollution control is higher than 7.916 and the input level of pollution control in GDP is lower than 1.77%, the negative moderating effect can be effectively reduced.

Interaction among Air Pollution, National Health, and Economic Development

“…Increased pollution will lead to an increase in the respiratory disease burden, i.e., the more serious the air pollution is, the heavier the respiratory disease burden will be and the more detrimental to the improvement of health status. Increased pollution also leads to adverse economic effects, a finding which is consistent with those of previous studies [33]. In short, better health levels can promote virtuous economic development, and healthy people tend to be more productive than sick people [34].…”

The dynamic relationship among economic development, air pollution, and health production in China: the DNSBM efficiency model

“…However, these studies did not construct empirical health economics models to explore the socioeconomic factors involved in environmental health problems. In addition, other scholars have begun to examine the intersections among economic development, air pollution, and public health (Wang, 2010;Drabo, 2011;Sueyoshi and Yuan, 2015;Li et al, 2016;Chen et al, 2019;Feng et al, 2019;Gong et al, 2019;Kubatko and Kubatko, 2019;Fu et al, 2020;Mujtaba and Shahzad, 2021;Hussain et al, 2022;Zhang et al, 2023). Still, research on the economy-environment connection is usually conducted separately from health studies, and few approaches have combined economy, the environment, and health and analyzed their relationship in depth.…”