The Impact of Socioeconomic and Environmental Indicators on Economic Development: An Interdisciplinary Empirical Study

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the effects of environmental sources and health statistics on economic growth and other development indicators of interest. With population growth, urbanization, and industrialization of economies, the built environment for human health has emerged as an important and growing driver in interdisciplinary research and evidence-based policy development, improving a country's growth prospects and the standard of living. A compressed structural Panel Vector Autoregression is used to address these issues. Methodologically, a hierarchical semiparametric Bayesian approach is involved to reduce the dimensionality, overtake variable selection problems, and model stochastic volatility. Policy-relevant strategies are also addressed to investigate causal relationships between sustainability indicators and economic growth.