Environmental implication of energy policies and private and public subsidies on infant mortality rate: a sustainable development study of India.

Abstract

India has remarkably achieved some level of decline in infant mortality rate and increase in aged person through increase in life expectancy due to improvement on its health care sector but still remain amongst the countries with the highest rate of infant mortality within the Asian countries. Literature on environmental implication remains scarce, and for this we utilised India's data from 1975 to 2020 to research on this topic. Relevant scientific methods (residual Augmented Least Squares - RALS, Engle and Granger - EG, and its newly augmented version - RALS-EG) are adopted in this study. Further, to estimate the long-run elasticities of the regressors, the symmetric analyses, i.e., dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS) and Engle and Granger causality test techniques, are employed. Findings according to DOLS revealed that renewable energy sources and social (GDP per capita) and public subsidies (general government final consumption expenditure) have lessening effect on infant mortality in India, whilst the private subsidies (gross capital formation), fossil fuels, and carbon dioxide cause an increase in infant mortality in India. This exposes renewable energy source as a mitigating factor in Indian environmental degradation which as well lessen the infant mortality level in India; hence, policy is suggested to be framed on improving renewable energy and health sectors. The graphical presentation of the abstract is done with the diagram below. The graph shows the interactions amongst the selected variables in this study. The impacts of the explanatory variables on the dependent variable are shown with different colours showing positive (green) and negative (red) impacts.