Spillovers From Renewable Energy to Life Expectancy in Emerging Market Economies

Abstract

Renewable energy sources have a minimal detrimental impact on health quality compared to non-renewable energy sources owing to the reduced carbon dioxide emissions that reduce negative externalities of pollution. Health quality can be measured through changes in life expectancy owing to changes in variables directly impacted by renewable energy usage. The chapter analyses the impact of renewable energy on life expectancy through four channels for 23 emerging market economies for the time period 1994-2015 using panel vector auto regression. Four hypotheses were developed for four channels: CO2 emissions, GDP per capita, technology level, and urbanization. The results conform to all the hypotheses: increase in renewable energy increases life expectancy by decreasing CO2 emissions and by increasing GDP per capita, technology level, and urbanization. Thus, to increase life expectancy, emerging market economies should increase their renewable energy usage since it reduces per capita CO2 emissions and increases GDP per capita, technological advancement, and urbanization.