Abstract
This paper introduces several factors, namely, environmental pollution, medical level and environmental governance, into the Grossman’s production function for health. Then, an empirical analysis was conducted based on the 2004–2016 panel data of the city clusters along the middle reaches of the Yangtze River. Through the analysis, the author evaluated and compared how different factors affect the health of residents in the three city clusters: Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan (CZT) city cluster, Wuhan city cluster and circum-Poyang Lake (CPL) city cluster. The results show that: (1) In all three city clusters, economic growth can effectively improve the health of residents, and environmental pollution is also a key influencing factor of the health of residents. (2) Medical level has a close correlation with the health of residents. In the CZT city cluster, the medical level is positively correlated with the health of residents; in the CPL city cluster, the correlation is negative and takes the shape of an inverted U in the long run. (3) In all three city clusters, the environmental governance has an inverted U-shape correlation with the health of residents, indicating that environmental governance is not enough to promote the health of residents. Finally, several countermeasures were put forward to enhance the health of residents in the study area. The research findings shed new light on policymaking for the health of residents.
Highlights
Since the reform and opening up, China has witnessed a sustained rapid growth of economy.the extensive mode of economic growth poses severe challenges to the energy and environment
Drawing on the research results of [14,19,24], the economic growth was selected as the input of the production function for health, the environmental pollution was taken as the mediating variable, while the medical level and environmental governance were adopted as exogenous explanatory variables
The following model was established: Healthit = cit + β1 lngdpgrit + β2 lnenvpit + β3 lnhospit + β4 envmit + μit where haelthit is the health level of residents in city cluster i at year t; lngdpgrit and lnenvpit are the economic growth and environmental pollution of city cluster i at year t, respectively; lnhospit and envmit are two control variables representing the medical level and environmental governance, respectively; β1, β2, β3 and β4 are estimated parameters reflecting the degree of influence of each variable on the health of residents and μit is a random disturbance term of each cross-section
Summary
Since the reform and opening up, China has witnessed a sustained rapid growth of economy. These city clusters occupy a very important position in China’s pursuit of green coordinated development. Most studies focused on the national or provincial level, failing to consider the difference between city clusters in economic development. To overcome these defects, this paper introduces several factors, namely, environmental pollution, medical level and environmental governance, to a Grossman model of health demand. Several feasible suggestions were put forward for incentive policies on the green, coordinated and harmonious development of the city clusters along the middle reaches of the Yangtze River. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 explains the research methods, model construction and data sources; Section 3 performs the empirical analysis and interprets the results and Section 4 puts forward the conclusions and suggestions
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