Environmental pollution, Health Expenditure and Economic Growth in Southeast Asian Countries: ARDL Panel Approach

Economic growth contributes to better health and better health to economic growth, Considering the effects of environmental pollution on the health of people in the community and its costs, it is expected that by improving the quality of the environment, on the one hand, the costs saved in the health sector will be used for investment and production growth, On the other hand, by improving the level of health in society, productivity will increase, which can be a stimulus for more production. Therefore, in this study, the relationship between environmental pollution, health expenditure (HE) and economic growth (Y) in Southeast Asian countries from 1990 to 2019 using long-term and short-term analytical method of combined group average estimator or PMG has been investigated. The panel unit root test and determine the degree of co-integration model variables 1 and the panel co-integration test and concluded that a long-term relationship between the co-integration model variables there, Model estimation showed that only economic growth with a coefficient of 1.336 has a positive and long-term effect on HE, which means that a unit of change in economic growth increases and changes health costs by 1.336 in the same direction. According to the principles, the quality of the environment had an inverse and significant relationship with health costs, Coefficient of 0.848 indicates the impact of health costs on this variable.