ABSTRACT
Policies throughout the world are presently focused on achieving a better quality of life and a longer life span through increased financial feasibility, ecological harmony, and economic stability. This effort seeks to empirically assess the impact of economic, health, environmental, and demographic factors on life expectancy in 36 high-income and 65 middle-income nations from 2000 to 2019. Using panels corrected standard errors (PCSEs) regression, this paper assures that high-income nations have significantly longer lifespans. The factors that lead most to this strengthening include GDP per capita, population growth, financial development, food production, and fertility rates. However, high-income countries tend to have shorter life expectancy due to rising mortality rates and carbon dioxide emissions. In middle-income nations, life expectancy falls significantly as a result of rising food production, health expenses, fertility rates, and economic hardship. Still, improving lifespan in middle-income nations is a result of multiple factors, including rising rates of GDP per capita, financial development, inequality in earnings between rural and urban places, and growing populations. The accuracy and credibility of the results are confirmed by using Driscoll-Kraay standard error estimates, feasible generalized least squares, random effect, and fixed effect approaches. The study’s results point to the notion that these countries should put more emphasis on demographic and economic factors that lengthen life expectancy. Further, as health and environmental issues contribute to a shorter life expectancy, governments should place a greater priority on these fields.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Acronyms
LE | = | Life expectancy |
EM | = | Economic Misery |
GDPPC | = | GDP Per Capita |
Fin | = | Financial Development |
Food | = | Food production |
Rueq | = | Rural- Urban income inequality |
Health | = | Health Expenditure |
Pop | = | Population |
Mor | = | Mortality Rate |
Fer | = | Fertility rate |
HT | = | Harris and Tzavalis |
IPS | = | Im – Pesaran – Shin |
CO2 | = | Carbon Dioxide Emissions |
PCSEs | = | Panel corrected standard errors |
FE | = | Fixed effect |
RE | = | Random effect |
FGLS | = | Feasible generalized least squares |
DKSE | = | Driscoll-Kraay standard error |
2SLS | = | Two Stage Least Squares |
GMM | = | Generalized Method of Moments |
LLC | = | Levin-Lin-Chu |
CADF | = | Cross-sectionally Augmented Dickey – Fuller |
WDI | = | World development indicator |
VIF | = | Variance inflation factor |
Availability of data
Data is readily available at request from the corresponding author.