Does environment quality and public spending on environment promote life expectancy in China? Evidence from a nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag approach

Environmental quality has become a growing concern for Chinese society since the last 2 decades in China. The large contribution of different pollutants severely affected the environmental quality that untimely affects life expectancy in the country. In this backdrop, the present study investigates the impact of environmental quality and public spending on the environment for life expectancy in China using the period 1999Q1–2017Q4. We employ nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL) approach for the empirical assessment. The outcomes of the study reveal the existence of a long‐run relationship between environmental quality, public spending on the environment and life expectancy in China. The empirical finding reported that life expectancy reacts differently in response to positive and negative shocks of environmental quality both in the long‐ and short‐run. Environmental quality and spending on the environment increase the life expectancy, furthermore, population has a positive and significant association with life expectancy only in short run while in long run it does not affect. Hence, the government needs to roll out policies to enhance environmental quality and ensure adequate funding for environmental preservation, to achieve both longevity of society and sustainability of the eco‐system.