Abstract
Industrial development has brought about not only rapid economic growth, but also serious environmental pollution in China, which has led to serious health problems and heavy economic burdens on healthcare. Therefore, the relationship between the industrial air pollution and health care expenditure (HCE) has attracted the attention of researchers, most of which used the traditional empirical methods, such as ordinary least squares (OLS), logistic and so on. By collecting the panel data of 30 provinces of China during 2005–2016, this paper attempts to use the Bayesian quantile regression (BQR) to reveal the impact of industrial air pollution represented by industrial waste gas emission (IWGE) on HCE in high-, middle-, low-income regions. It was found that double heterogeneity in the influence of IWGE on HCE was obvious, which revealed that people in high-, middle-, low-income regions have significantly different understandings of environmental pollution and health problems. In addition, the BQR method provided more information than the traditional empirical methods, which verified that the BQR method, as a new empirical method for previous studies, was applicable in this topic and expanded the discussion space of this research field.
Highlights
It is widely recognized that China has achieved great improvements in economic growth and population health in the last few decades, such as a dramatically lower mortality rate, increased life expectancy and extensive immunization coverage
To check for stationarity of the changes of health care expenditure (HCE) and other variables, Table 3 reports the results of the panel unit root tests
Our findings may contribute to some useful information on the impact of industrial waste gas emission (IWGE)
Summary
It is widely recognized that China has achieved great improvements in economic growth and population health in the last few decades, such as a dramatically lower mortality rate, increased life expectancy and extensive immunization coverage. The latest statistics show that the national infant mortality rate was 7.5 per thousand in 2016, which was a decrease by 76.7 percent from 2000. The rate of nationwide hospital births reached 99.7 percent in 2016, which was an increase by 36.9 percent from 2000. Increasing environmental problems have led to serious health problems. With the promotion of industrial policy and the development of the economy and technology, economic development has entered the middle and late stages of industrialization in China. The current environmental problems are still not optimistic, and there is still a considerable way to go to control pollution and accelerate to meet the peak of the environmental Kuznets curve
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