Air pollution, economic growth and health care expenditure

In this article, we examine the role of environmental quality and economic growth in the determination of health expenditure in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) countries for the period 1995-2014 using Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) method to explore the estimating the impacts of economic growth and environmental quality on heath expenditure. The results show that health expenditure, income, CO2 and PM10 emissions are a cointegrated panel. While long-run elasticities show that income and CO2 and PM10 emissions have statistically significant positive effects on health expenditure. The results show that the income elasticity is inelastic, that health expenditure is not more sensitive to income and the adjustment to changes in income in MENA countries.