Abstract
Currently, preventing and controlling air pollution and inhibiting the excessively rapid growth of medical expenditures to reduce the living burden of residents have become a focus of general concern of society as a whole. It is of great significance to conduct an in-depth study of the relationship between air pollution and public health expenditure and clarify to what extent air pollution affects health expenditure. Thus, this paper adopted spatial econometric methods to measure the impact of air pollution on residents’ health expenditure via panel data from 16 core cities in the Yangtze River Delta in China from 2005 to 2017. The results indicate that (1) at present, the air pollution in the Yangtze River Delta core urban agglomeration is still relatively prominent and has obvious spatial aggregation phenomena, and the particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5) concentration shows the characteristic of decreasing gradually from northwest to southeast; (2) air pollution is the main factor that promotes the increase in residents’ health expenditure; (3) the spatial spillover effect of air pollution is obvious, accounting for half of the total effect; and (4) the impact of government public services on residents’ health expenditure varies. Finally, this paper proposes corresponding policy implications based on the findings.
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Funding
This research is supported by the Project of National Social Science Foundation of China (NSSFC): Study on the Spatial Effects and Governance Strategies of the Impact of Urban Haze Pollution on Public Health (No. 17BJY063).
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Sun, H., Leng, Z., Zhao, H. et al. The impact of air pollution on urban residents’ health expenditure: spatial evidence from Yangtze River Delta, China. Air Qual Atmos Health 14, 343–350 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11869-020-00939-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11869-020-00939-y