title: How relevant is environmental quality to per capita health expenditures? Empirical evidence from panel of developing countries.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Developing countries have witnessed economic growth as their GDP keeps increasing steadily over the years. The growth led to higher energy consumption which eventually leads to increase in air pollutions that pose a danger to human health. People's healthcare demand, in turn, increase due to the changes in the socioeconomic life and improvement in the health technology. This study is an attempt to investigate the impact of environmental quality on per capital health expenditure in 125 developing countries within a panel cointegration framework from 1995 to 2012.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We found out that a long-run relationship exists between per capita health expenditure and all explanatory variables as they were panel cointegrated. The explanatory variables were found to be statistically significant in explaining the per capita health expenditure. The result further revealed that CO2 has the highest explanatory power on the per capita health expenditure. The impact of the explanatory power of the variables is greater in the long-run compared to the short-run. Based on this result, we conclude that environmental quality is a powerful determinant of health expenditure in developing countries.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Therefore, developing countries should as a matter of health care policy give provision of healthy air a priority via effective policy implementation on environmental management and control measures to lessen the pressure on health care expenditure. Moreover more environmental proxies with alternative methods should be considered in the future research.
authors.affiliation: Economics Department, Faculty of Economics and Management, University Putra Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia.
authors.forename: Adamu
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Yahaya
authors.affiliation: Economics Department, Faculty of Economics and Management, University Putra Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia.
authors.forename: Norashidah Mohamed
authors.initials: NM
authors.lastname: Nor
authors.affiliation: Economics Department, Faculty of Economics and Management, University Putra Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia.
authors.forename: Muzafar Shah
authors.initials: MS
authors.lastname: Habibullah
authors.affiliation: Economics Department, Faculty of Economics and Management, University Putra Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia.
authors.forename: Judhiana Abd
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Ghani
authors.affiliation: Economics Department, Faculty of Economics and Management, University Putra Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia.
authors.forename: Zaleha Mohd
authors.initials: ZM
authors.lastname: Noor
keywords: Environmental quality; Health expenditure; Panel cointegration