The Effects of Poverty, Inequality and Environmental Pollution on Health in Developed and Developing Countries

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to study the effects of inequality, poverty and environmental pollution on health index in developing as well as developed countries. To reach this goal, data has been used for 23 developed and 94 developing countries. The maximum time period covered by this study was from 1990 to 2015 in which unbalanced panel data has been used. To select the appropriate model to estimate the final model, panel stationarity test and Hausman test has been done. The result of tests suggest that fixed effects model for estimating health regression for developing countries is an appropriate one which shows that poverty and different indicators of pollution as well as income inequality have negative effect on health index (child mortality rate) and education index has a positive effect on the health in this countries .The results also show that in developed countries environmental pollution indices , income inequality index and urbanization rate have a negative and significant effect on health index and per capita health expenditure has a positive effect on the health of people in this countries.

Keywords

• health
• environmental pollution
• poverty