Life Expectancy Amid Higher Carbon Emissions: A Panel Data Analysis

Environmental aspects and emissions have a direct impact on various health indicators, especially life expectancy. Environmental policies very often differ across nations as per their requirement of obtaining a comparative advantage in international markets. Such policies have a direct impact on the life expectancy of people of a nation through various environmental indicators. It is generally argued that developed nations with strict environmental policies enjoy good health standards, but the opposite case is witnessed in developing nations that have weaker environmental standards. Nevertheless, due to global warming and other international as well as national aspects, even developing nations have started to implement robust environmental policies. But, how far such policies have been effective is a question of debate. All these aspects will be discussed in this paper. This chapter will consider twelve developed and thirteen developing nations and see how far environmental indicators (CO2) have been influential in having a substantial impact on the life expectancy (LE) of a nation with the help of panel data analysis. Here we have considered both short-run dynamics as well as long-run association. We have also performed the Granger causality test to check the association between the variables. Our findings show that CO2 does have an impact on life expectancy for both sets of nations in the case of the linear and nonlinear nature of the relationship, but the opposite does not hold on every occasion.