The effect of natural resource rent, income inequality on infant mortality with an emphasis on two institutional quality indicators of democracy and corruption

Reducing infant mortality is known as one of the goals of development and an as the indicator of health. One of the factors affecting health in countries with natural resources such as oil is economic dependence on natural resources. It is stated in this way that at first the income from the sale of natural resources can have a positive effect on health, and with the increase in rent resulting from that, the state of institutional quality has weakened, leading to an increase in income inequality and a decrease in gross domestic product, and therefore has a negative effect on health. . Therefore, this study investigates the effect of oil rent on infant mortality using Autoregressive Distributed Lag approach with (ARDL) to investigate the effect of oil rent on infant mortality according to institutional quality and income inequality index during the period 1984 to 2021. The estimation results showed that the oil rent had a U-shaped effect on the infant mortality index in the long term. But this relationship has not been confirmed for the short term. The effect of democracy, GDP and urbanization on infant mortality has been negative in the long term, and the effect of the Gini coefficient on this indicator has been positive in the long and short term. The effect of the corruption control index on infant mortality has had a positive effect in the short term, which confirms the theory of economic wheel greasers.