Socio-economic and environmental factors influenced the United Nations healthcare sustainable agenda: evidence from a panel of selected Asian and African countries

Does gender equality in education matter for environmental sustainability in sub-Saharan Africa?

The present study provides a macro-level framework for gender issues and their link to energy policies and environmental quality, in line with the sustainable development goals (SDG). It examines the relationship between environmental sustainability, gender equality in education, energy consumption, and sub-Saharan Africa's income by using cointegration analysis and autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) method. The study's estimation results are consistent with the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis and policy actions suggested by eco-feminist theories in both the short-run and long-run and show that gender equality in education has positively related to environmental sustainability in sub-Saharan Africa.

Technowomen: Women’s Autonomy and Its Impact on Environmental Quality

The role of women in economic development and the global environment is vital for progressing them towards the United Nations sustainable development goal (SDG-5) that emphasized the need to empower women in every walk of life. The study examines women’s autonomy in the sustainable development agenda under China’s open innovation system from 1975 to 2019. The study employed an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model, vector autoregressive (VAR) Granger causality, and innovation accounting matrix to estimate parameters. The existing data are summarized and collated in the context of China to explain as a correlational study. The results show that women’s autonomy moderated with technology spills over to decrease greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and substantiate the hump-shaped relationship between them. The increased spending on research and development (R&D) activities, patent publications, and renewable energy consumption empowers women to be equipped with the latest sustainable technologies to improve environmental quality. The pollution haven hypothesis verifies a given country, where trade liberalization policies tend to increase polluting industries to set up their plants that engaged in dirty production that exacerbate GHG emissions. The causality estimates confirmed that technological innovations and renewable energy consumption leads to women’s autonomy. In contrast, females’ share in the labor force participation rate leads to an increase in renewable energy consumption. Thus, it is evident that there is a positive role of women in the country’s sustainable development.

Identifying the Potential Causes, Consequences, and Prevention of Communicable Diseases (Including COVID-19)

Communicable and noncommunicable diseases cause millions of deaths every year, increased billions of healthcare expenditures, and consequently increase trillions of economic losses at a global scale. This study more focused on the prevalence of communicable diseases, including COVID-19 that is an emerging pandemic, which affects the global economy. The objective of the study is to examine the impact of population density, lack of sanitation facilities, chemical concentration, fossil fuel combustions, poverty incidence, and healthcare expenditures on communicable diseases including COVID-19. The study covered a large panel of heterogenous countries to assess the relationships between the stated factors by using the robust least square regression, Granger causality test, and innovation accounting matrix. The study used a time series data from 2010 to 2019 for assessing the determinants of communicable diseases, while it is further extended with the current data of 2019-2020 for the COVID-19 pandemic. The results of the study show that high population density, lack of primary handwashing facilities, chemicals used in manufacturing value-added fossil fuel combustion, and poverty headcount substantially increase communicable diseases. In contrast, population diffusion, low carbon concentration in air, renewable fuels, and healthcare expenditures decrease infectious diseases in a panel of 78 countries. The causal inferences found the bidirectional relationship between communicable diseases and primary handwashing facility, and carbon emissions and poverty headcount, whereas the unidirectional relationship is running from lack of sanitation to infectious diseases, economic growth to carbon emissions, and communicable diseases to fossil fuel combustion across countries. Communicable diseases increase healthcare expenditures and decrease the country's economic growth which is a vital concern of the global economy to confront the outbreak of novel coronavirus through increasing the healthcare budget in national bills and stabilize financial activities at a worldwide scale.

Relationship between population growth, price level, poverty incidence, and carbon emissions in a panel of 98 countries

The objective of the study is to examine the dynamic linkages between population growth, price level, poverty headcount ratio, and carbon emissions under investigation of different plausible hypothesis, including "population-induced poverty trap," "welfare-reducing effects," "environmental Kuznets curve," and "pollution haven" hypotheses in the cross-sectional setting of 98 developed and developing countries for the period of 2011. The study used cross-sectional regression and switching regression regime for empirical analysis. The result shows a positive relationship between changes in price level and carbon emissions that verify "welfare-reducing effects," while there is a negative relationship between population growth and poverty at varying poverty threshold to support the "Gary Becker human capital theory." Further, there is a positive relationship between poverty rates and carbon emissions across countries. The results verified the "pollution haven" hypothesis in account of increase in pollution through financial liberalization policies. A U-shaped relationship is found between economic growth and carbon emissions in a given time period. The study concludes that globalized world should have to be careful when devising environmental sustainability policies, as it is important to provide social safety nets to the lower income strata group; hence, it would be helpful to achieve global green development agenda.

Does communicable diseases (including COVID-19) may increase global poverty risk? A cloud on the horizon

Coronavirus epidemic can push millions of people in poverty. The shortage of healthcare resources, lack of sanitation, and population compactness leads to an increase in communicable diseases, which may increase millions of people add in a vicious cycle of poverty. The study used the number of factors that affect poverty incidence in a panel of 76 countries for a period of 2010-2019. The dynamic panel GMM estimates show that the causes of death by communicable diseases, chemical-induced carbon and fossil fuel combustion, and lack of access to basic hand washing facilities menace to increase poverty headcounts, whereas, an increase in healthcare expenditures substantially decreases poverty headcounts across countries. Further, the results show the U-shaped relationship between economic growth and poverty headcounts, as economic growth first decreases and later increase poverty headcount due to rising healthcare disparities among nations. The causality estimates show that lack of access to basic amenities lead to increase of communicable diseases including COVID-19 whereas chemical-induced carbon and fossil fuel emissions continue to increase healthcare expenditures and economic growth in a panel of selected countries. The rising healthcare disparities, regional conflicts, and public debt burden further 'hold in the hand' of communicable diseases that push millions of people in the poverty trap.

The nexus of environmental quality with renewable consumption, immigration, and healthcare in the US: wavelet and gradual-shift causality approaches

Given that the volume of carbon emissions in the US is a significant share of the global greenhouse gas emissions, some salient factors are being currently examined so as to reverse the threat to global environmental sustainability. To this regard, the current study investigates the co-movement and long-term and short-term causal relationship between CO₂ emission (a proxy for environmental quality) and renewable consumption, immigration, and healthcare by using the wavelet coherence approach which primarily provides information on dynamic correlations over time and for different time scales. The coherence approach allows the one-dimensional time data into the bi-dimensional time-frequency sphere between the variables. In addition to investigating the causal relationship between CO₂ and renewable consumption, immigration, and healthcare, this study also employs gradual-shift causality and Toda-Yamamoto causality tests. With this, the study found a high variation for CO₂ emission in the US at 8 scales (8 quarters) from 1999 to 2008. Additionally, there is significant feedback causality between CO₂ emission and renewable consumption at different scales while a positive correlation between the variables is observed in the short run. Similarly, the result reveals that immigration significantly causes CO₂ emission in the US from 2008 to 2010 and a two-way causality is detected between CO₂ emission and healthcare at different frequencies and time period. Moreover, the Toda-Yamamoto causality and gradual-shift causality tests provide supportive evidence to the outcomes of the wavelet coherence-based causality test in this study. Overall, the investigation offers significant policy directive especially toward addressing the potential adverse effects from the country's immigration and healthcare amendments.

Economics of death and dying: a critical evaluation of environmental damages and healthcare reforms across the globe

The economics of death and dying highlighted that environmental factors negatively influence healthcare sustainability. Therefore, this study conducted a system-based literature review to identify the negative externality of environmental damages on global healthcare reforms. Based on 42 peer-reviewed papers in the field of healthcare reforms and 12 papers in the field of environmental hazards, we identified 25 factors associated with death and dying and 15 factors associated with health-related damages across the world respectively. We noted that environmental factors are largely responsible to affect healthcare sustainability reforms by associating with the number of healthcare diseases pertaining to air pollutants. The study suggests healthcare practitioners and environmentalists to devise long-term sustainable healthcare policies by limiting highly toxic air pollutants through technology-embodied green healthcare infrastructure to attained efficient global healthcare recovery.