Search

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The income inequality-economy link has been argued by researchers a long time. But the impact of income inequality on environmental pollution is a new investigation topic for developing countries. Turkey is well known as an emerging economy which has a high level of income inequality and CO2 emissions. Therefore, this paper concentrates on the income inequality-CO2 emissions link in Turkish economy by applying a nonlinear analysis. This paper integrates economic growth and financial development to the CO2 emissions specification over the period of 1987–2019. We employ the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag approach to explore the long-run nonlinear linkages between the series. Our findings reveal an asymmetric cointegration among variables. Positive and negative income inequality shocks positively affect CO2 emissions implying that positive and negative shocks of income inequality enhance CO2 emissions in the long run. Negative economic growth shocks decrease CO2 emissions, while positive shocks to financial development increase CO2 emissions in the long run. We provide important policy suggestions that might be useful to the policymakers to decrease CO2 emissions in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Renewable energy is an important alternative energy source in terms of both sustainable growth and climate change. In this paper, the causality nexus between renewable energy consumption and economic growth is analyzed in 15 emerging countries covering the period from 1990 to 2015. The paper adopts the bootstrap panel causality test which is developed by (Kónya, Econ Model 23:978–992, 2006) to consider the cross-sectional dependence. The results of (Kónya, Econ Model 23:978–992, 2006) prove the validity of the neutrality hypothesis in all countries. Then, we analyze asymmetric causality among the variables. Asymmetric test denotes a causality from negative shocks of economic growth to negative shocks of renewable energy consumption in South Africa, Thailand, and Turkey. Thus, a negative shock in economic growth hampers renewable energy consumption in these countries. Our results demonstrate the consequences of the application of disaggregated data in the analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]