The Impact of Economic Growth and Environmental Quality on Health Expenditures in Iran; Aggregate in Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model

Economic growth and sustainable development is the ideal goal of all nations and directly leads to improving the health of society. However, indirectly and through environmental degradation can have a negative impact on health status, so the main purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of economic growth and environmental quality on health expenditures in Iran.

The present descriptive-analytical and applied study at the national level was performed using the autoregression econometric method with distributive intervals in Eviews 10 software. The data were of the annual time series that were extracted for the years 2006-2006 from the databases of the World Bank, the Statistics Center of Iran and Yale University.

There was a long-term relationship between economic growth, environmental quality and health spending in Iran. The long-term elasticity of health expenditures to GDP, environmental performance index and government health expenditures were 0.85, -0.13 and 1.18, respectively. Also, physician supply had a positive effect of 0.38 on health expenditures. The error correction factor was also estimated to be -0.22.

Increasing economic growth, government health expenditures and the supply of physicians had a positive effect, and improving the environmental performance index had a negative effect on health expenditures. Therefore, policies to maintain sustainability and reduce environmental pollutants, as well as invest in advanced equipment to purify pollutant gases will be useful.