The spillover effect of fiscal environmental protection spending on residents’ medical and healthcare expenditure: evidence from China

Abstract

The Chinese government has not only been increasing investments in environmental protection, improving the quality of the ecological environment, but has also been focusing on curbing the excessive growth of medical and healthcare expenses so as to ease the economic burden of China's residents. Both aspects are significant concerns worldwide and have received much research attention individually, but the relationship between government environmental protection expenditure and residents' medical and healthcare expenditure remains unclear. Based on panel data from 31 provinces in China from 2007 to 2019, this paper empirically reveals that fiscal environmental protection expenditure is significantly negatively correlated with per capita medical and healthcare expenditure of residents (including outpatient expenditure and inpatient expenditure). This study shows that increasing the fiscal environmental protection expenditure can help curb the rising level of residents' medical and healthcare expenditure. In addition, the results of heterogeneity analysis indicate that the above relationship is stronger in provinces with a relatively low level of economic development or low proportion of the population over 65 years old. Management implications are discussed.

The impact of national comprehensive medical reform on residents' medical expenses: Evidence from China

“…Therefore, the influencing factors of residents' medical expenses are important topics that scholars have paid attention to for a long time. For example, the existing literature investigated the above issue from the perspective of air pollution (10)(11)(12)(13)(14), environmental regulation (15,16), fiscal decentralization (17), and energy use (18).…”

“…In general, the existing literature comprehensively investigated the influencing factors of residents' medical expenses from multiple perspectives. Some studies believed that serious air pollution is not conducive to residents' health, which may increase residents' medical expenses (10)(11)(12)(13)(14), while strict environmental regulations can alleviate this adverse effect to a certain extent (15,16). Other studies explained residents' high medical expenses from the perspectives of fiscal decentralization (17) and energy use (18).…”

How Do Environmental Protection Expenditures Affect Health Status? Evidence From Panel Quantile Regression

“…To determine the influence of EPE, CO2 emissions, education and per capita income on LE, this study utilizes the following model that is in line with the existing literature (Onofrei et al, 2020;Sheng et al, 2021;Alimi & Ajide, 2021;Omri et al, 2022): The relationship between LEXP, EPE, CO2, GDP per capita and education in 20 European countries is examined in four steps. First, we test the stationary properties of these series by employing the CIPS unit root test.…”

“…(2020) revealed a strong positive association between EPE and health status. Sheng et al (2021) concluded that raising EPE can reduce the rate of escalating medical and healthcare costs.…”

Does China’s poverty alleviation policy improve the quality of the ecological environment in poverty-stricken areas?

“…In model (3), GPSit, GFPit denote two mediating variables. GPSit represents the level of government public expenditure, and the logarithm of local government fiscal expenditure is used to measure the level of government public expenditure (GPS) with reference to Sheng's approach (Sheng et al, 2022). GFPit stands for Government Fiscal Pressure and, drawing on the practice of Reserve Bank, uses the local government fiscal vertical imbalance rate to measure government fiscal pressure (GFP) (Lin and Zhou., 2021b).…”