The Relationship between Economic Growth, CO2 Emissions and Health Expenditures in Turkey under Structural Breaks

One of the many factors that affect human health is the destructions in the quality of the environment. Especially, the destructions in the environmental quality caused by increasing economic activities poses serious threats in terms of health. Health problems caused by environmental destruction leads to rapid increase in health expenditures. In this study, the effects of environmental destruction and economic growth on health expenditures of Turkey in the 1980-2016 years have been analyzed using single structural break Zivot-Andrews test and Gregory-Hansen cointegration test. While analyzing causal relation among variables, Toda Yamamoto method has been used. At this study CO2 emission per capita is used as indicator of environmental disruption and real GDP per capita has been used as indicator of economic growth, and health expenditure has been measured as per capita. The result of the analysis have shown that there is not a long term relation among health expenditures, economic growth and CO2 emission. In addition, one way causality relationship has been determined from health expenditure towards economic growth and CO2 emissions and from economic growth towards CO2 emissions.