Life expectancy in the ANZUS-BENELUX countries: The role of renewable energy, environmental pollution, economic growth and good governance

Abstract

Higher life expectancy reflects better public health status, an essential element for countries' overall development. However, life expectancy can be affected by various socio-economic and political factors. To mitigate the debate of the contributory factors, a detailed empirical study on factors that affect life expectancy is still a necessity. Therefore the main aim of this study is to identify the role of a number of disparate issues: renewable energy, environmental pollution, economic growth, urbanization and good governance on life expectancy at birth in the ANZUS-BENELUX countries utilizing the annual data of 24 years (1996–2019) by using different econometric approaches like the Driscoll and Kraay's (1998) standard error technique and feasible generalized least square (FGLS) model. This study reveals that renewable energy economic growth, good governance and urbanization have positive influences on life expectancy. With 1% increase of these variables, life expectancy increases by 0.009%, 0.070%, 0.022% and 0.107%, respectively; whereas environmental pollution has a negative influence on the life expectancy with the elasticity of 0.015. The Dumitrescu and Hurlin panel causality test also identifies a causal association between the selected variables and life expectancy. All the findings are theoretically and empirically consistent and have important breakthrough for health policies.