Factors affecting the environment and their impact on public health outcomes in Africa

This thesis presents empirical studies on some important issues in African countries and aims to contribute to the literature on i) the environmental impacts of trade liberalization, ii) the effect of institutional quality on the cooperation to reduce global carbon dioxide (CO2) across African countries and iii) the effect of air pollution on public health outcomes.In the first objective, the study examines the role of trade liberalization as an important determinant of greenhouse gas emissions. Following related theoretical arguments, the study focuses on examining whether the changes in environmental pollutants emanating from freer trade across African countries are better explained by the differences in environmental regulations and/or the differences in physical capital endowments. The changes in production and trade-related greenhouse gas emissions are also decomposed into scale, technique and composition effects.Using the generalized method of moment (GMM) estimation technique and by controlling other relevant factors, the study finds evidence that supports the factor endowment hypothesis for both PM10 and CO2. However, there are no convincing evidence of pollution haven hypothesis for both pollutants. In addition, the study finds that trade openness has different scale, technique, composition and trade intensity effects on different types of pollutants analysed in this study. Specifically, the technique effect is greater than the scale effect for PM10, whereas the technique effect is dominated by the scale effect for CO2. The scale, technique and direct composition effects on both pollutants are found to be greater than the trade-induced composition effect.The second objective investigates the effect of institutional quality on the cooperation of African countries to reduce global emissions of CO2. Using the GMM estimation technique and by controlling for real per capita GDP, its growth rate and other conditional control variables, the study minimized the unexplained change in the dependent variable. The results provide evidence for the significant effect of institutional quality on the growth rates of CO2 emissions.The third objective evaluates the effect of air pollution on the public health outcome in African countries. Specifically, by employing the GMM estimation technique, the study analyses the effect of air pollution on adult and child mortality rates. Regarding air pollution and adult mortality, the results show that an increase in the level of particulate air pollution have a significant effect on increasing adult mortality rates. This effect is found to differ across gender, but not statistically significant. The analysis also establishes a significant effect of particulate air pollution on infant and under-five mortality rates across the sample of African countries. However, this effect is also found to be statistically insignificant.Finally, the findings from this thesis show that more openness would have more positive effect on PM10 compared to CO2. However, more general, none of the two pollutants seems to increase steadily with economic progress. The findings also demonstrates that more commitment to improve political institutions (control of corruption, the rule of law and bureaucratic quality could promote self-interest in African countries to reduce global ―concentration of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere‖. Also more elevated air pollution would lead to increasing mortality across African countries, irrespective of gender or demographic. This is in addition to a rising demand for healthcare services.

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