Impacts of Pollutants in Different Sectors of the Economy on Healthcare Expenditures

Introduction

The process of economic development of countries and the set of economic policies in recent decades has been such that environmental challenges have become one of the most important concerns of policymakers. Therefore, examining the role and impact of government economic policies on environmental quality can be important. All types of pollution from economic activities enter the environment and destroy plants, animals, and environmental systems. Air pollution, surface and groundwater pollution, soil pollution, increasing disease rates, human mortality, and generally reducing the quality of the environment and reducing human enjoyment of nature result from productive activities for economic growth. For this reason, examining the relationship between economic growth and environmental quality is very important for economists (Aşıcı, 2013). Today, the environment is considered one of the most important pillars of sustainable development, and the development of other economic and social sectors depends on its sustainability and proper functioning. For this reason, in recent years, and especially since the early 1990s, at the same time as the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the international community has increasingly focused on environmental protection (Arouri et all, 2012).

And for this reason, several regional and international memoranda of understanding have been concluded to protect the environment in the international community. International environmental developments, on the one hand, and the spread of environmental degradation processes in the country, like many other countries, on the other hand, have made the issue of environmental protection more in the spotlight of policymakers and decision-makers (Sehrawat & Giri, 2018). The relationship and governing laws between economic development and environmental degradation are important and very complex issues. Environment and natural resources are the suppliers of many production institutions, and the production process, in addition to desirable outputs (consumer goods), also brings undesirable outputs (environmental pollutants). Therefore, if there are no changes in production techniques and processes, then the loss from undesirable outputs will outweigh the benefits of desirable output(Brunekreef & Holgate, 2002). This issue is more important in the macro dimension. Air pollution imposes costs on people's lives, including reducing the health and longevity of people, reducing productivity, increasing health care costs, lack of full use of resources and economic facilities, increasing government spending to control pollution. From this perspective, increasing pollution is considered an obstacle in the path of economic development of countries(Bayat et al., 2019). Accordingly, it is necessary to identify the factors affecting it and adopt appropriate policies to reduce this phenomenon(Bloch et al., 2012). In most experimental studies, the Kuznets environmental curve has been used to identify the factors affecting environmental pollution in which the emission of pollution is assumed to be a function of income or per capita production (Cristea et al., 2013). The question now is which part of the Kuznets curve are the world's economies and whether the economic model of developing countries conforms to this theory. This study seeks to find an appropriate answer to this question (Danish & Wang, 2018). The data panel model is studied and experimentally analyzed after entering the necessary variables in the model and the effect of environmental pollution in different sectors on health care costs (health care costs) in Iran. Also, as mentioned in detail in the experimental model of variables (technology, research, development costs, and population growth), the relationship between these variables and health care costs has been discussed.