Research On The Impact Of Regional Carbon Dioxide Emissions On Medical And Health Expenditure In China

As we known,air pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide pose certain health risks and diseases to residents.Does carbon dioxide,which is not a pollutant,pose health risks and diseases to residents?By the end of 2017,China's carbon dioxide emissions had reached 98.66 million tons,ranking first in the world.Carbon dioxide in the higher concentration will have a direct impact on the human body,low concentration will also have a certain impact on the human judgment;In addition,the greenhouse effect caused by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases will also cause certain changes in climate,which will have a negative impact on human health.At present,some foreign literatures have carried out researches on the health risks of residents caused by carbon dioxide emissions,and further studied the relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and medical and health expenditures.However,there is no relevant literature on this issue in China,so this paper intends to fill the gap.This paper aims to study the impact of carbon dioxide emissions on medical health care expenditure.Therefore,for carbon dioxide emissions,this paper selected two indexes of carbon dioxide emissions per capita and carbon dioxide emission density as the core explanatory variables.For medical and health expenditure,this paper selects the index of per capita medical and health expenditure as the explanatory variable.Then,the indicators of 30 Chinese provinces,municipalities and autonomous regions(Tibet autonomous region data missing)from 2003 to 2017 were selected for statistical description to observe the trend of per capita carbon dioxide emission,carbon dioxide emission density and per capita medical health care expenditure in each region of China.Finally,in the empirical study,four control variables are selected,namely: per capita GDP,per capita years of education,urbanization rate and old-age dependency ratio,to represent the income level,education level,urbanization process and aging level respectively.In this paper,two-way fixed effect model is used to study the per capita carbon dioxide emission and the effect of carbon dioxide emission density on per medical capita health care expenditure in China,and on this basis,quantile regression model is used to further explore it.The empirical results show that :(1)both the per capita carbon dioxide emission and the carbon dioxide emission density have a significant positive impact on the per capita medical health care expenditure of residents,among which the per capita carbon dioxide emission has a higher impact than the carbon dioxide emission density.(2)the per capita GDP,the dependency ratio of the elderly and the urbanization rate all have a significant positive impact on the medical care expenditure,among which the urbanization rate has the largest impact on the per capita medical care expenditure of residents.Average years of education have a negative impact on health care spending.(3)with the increase of medical health care expenditure,the per capita carbon dioxide emission and carbon dioxide emission density have a greater impact on medical health care expenditure.