The Study of Human Development Dimensions (Education, Health, and Welfare) Effects on Environmental Performance Index

The effort of countries to increase national income and well-being, if not accompanied by environmental considerations, leads to unrepairable losses. For this reason, the environment over the past few decades has been one of the concerns of human societies. Hence, in recent years, the quality and sustainability of the environment have become very important at both the national and international levels. Many governments have realized that they could not isolate environmental performance apart from other measures of development. Hence, the necessity of HDI improvement with the environmental dimensions was a theme of discussion during the most recent Rio+20-United Nation Conference on Sustainable Development (2012), as part of Millennium Development Goals. Since the Human Development Index can describe social development and economic development simultaneously, the main goal of this study is to examine the impact of the dimensions of human development index, especially education, on the Environmental Performance Index. The results based on the panel data fixed effects model using GLS in the 101 selected countries during 2005-2015 show that the three dimensions of the Human Development Index, namely health, education, and welfare, have a positive and significant effect on the environmental performance.