Abstract
There have been considerable concerns regarding the effects of air pollution on health and economy over the past decades across the world. As insurance coverage has been closely related to household welfare, we aim to investigate the influence of air pollution, in particular, the sulfur dioxide (SO2) pollution on household purchases of commercial health insurance using data from the 2017 China Household Financial Survey (CHFS). The results show that the rise in SO2 emission has a significant positive association with tendency of residents to participate in commercial health insurance. The possibility of household commercial health insurance purchasing increases by 4% per 1,000 tons of SO2 emission. In addition, the proportion of commercial health insurance expenditure in household annual income increases by 29% per 1,000 tons of SO2 emission. The effects are also found to differ among resident groups. Residents in eastern parts of China are more likely to buy commercial health insurance facing SO2 pollution compared to those in western parts of China; people with higher income are more likely to be affected compared to those with lower income; families with the household head being female are more likely to be affected compared to those with the household head being male. This research provides baseline information on the formulation and implementation of future operation strategy in commercial health insurance companies of China.
Highlights
Air pollution is one of the leading issues threatening human health
In order to reveal the effect of SO2 pollution on household commercial health insurance purchasing and its degree, this paper employs the Probit and Tobit models as mentioned above, which are denoted by model 1 and model 2, respectively
For the regression results using the Probit model, it is shown that there exists a significant association between SO2 pollution and household commercial health insurance purchasing with the value of coefficient being 0.004, which suggests that SO2 pollution would raise the possibility of a household purchasing commercial health insurance
Summary
Air pollution is one of the leading issues threatening human health. As the WHO suggested in 2016, almost 91% of people over the world lived in areas with major air pollutants higher than the WHO standard, and outdoor air pollution caused nearly 3.7 million deaths. Chinese residents were still exposed to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) three times higher than the standard stipulated in the WHO guideline This situation mentioned above gives great significance in studying the health effect of air pollution. According to the health investment model and the health capital depreciation theory developed by Grossman [14], the outside shock aroused by exposure to air pollutants including SO2 would accelerate the depreciation of health capital stock of residents. To maintain their health status, residents should expand their health expenditures. Few researches focus on how to cope with this side effect that air pollution brought, which is of great necessity to improve people’s well-being and promote public health
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