Impacts of the energy transition on public health in the context of country risk: From an international perspective

Abstract

The global climate issue is becoming increasingly serious, and studying the energy transition (ET) has proven to be an effective solution to this problem. The essence of climate mitigation is to address the issue of ensuring the public health (PH) of human beings. Still, the definitions of ET in existing literature are inconsistent, and Many researches overlook the definitions of ET in official documents and discuss the relationship between ET and PH. Therefore, this research utilizes panel data from 107 countries over the period 2000-2020 to construct an energy transition indicator based on the definition from the World Economic Forum (WEF). It also examines the link between ET and PH using a two-way fixed effects regression. In the current turbulent international environment, this paper also investigates this link in the context of composite risk control (CRC), financial risk control (FRC), economic risk control (ERC), and political risk control (PRC). The results show that ET can significantly improve PH, a conclusion that remains significant after being subjected to a range of robustness tests. The study exploring the mechanism impact on the relationship between ET and PH shows that CRC, FRC, ERC, and PRC all strengthen the effect of ET on PH, and the mechanism effect varies considerably between high-income and low- and middle-income countries (LMICs); ET is more significantly affected by the mechanism in LMICs than in high-income countries. Furthermore, this paper illustrates that ET does not differ by gender in improving PH among infants, while there are gender differences in adults by using the instrumental variable regression and GMM regression to mitigate the endogenous and heteroscedasticity issue for heterogeneity test. The study in this paper can not only inspire policy researchers on which aspects to promote ET, but also provide a direction for improving PH.