ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Environmental Health and Exposome
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1650912
Do Environmental degradation and geopolitical risk hinder life expectancy? The role of institutional quality and technological innovation
Provisionally accepted
- 1Chengdu Technological University, Chengdu, China
- 2Xihua University, Chengdu, China
- 3First Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang Chinese Medical University, Hangzhou, China
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Environmental degradation (ED) and geopolitical risk (GPR) reduce life expectancy (LE) by worsening health through pollution and ecosystem damage, and by disrupting healthcare systems and basic services via conflicts, displacement, and food insecurity. Together, they create unstable living conditions that shorten lifespans. Thus, this study aims to investigate the impact of ED, GPR, institutional quality (IQ) and technological innovation (TI) on LE in BRIC economies from 1993 to 2022. This study employed the second-generation econometrics technique. We used Cross-sectional augmented distributed lag (CS-ARDL), fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS), and Dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS) methods. The result shows that ED and GPR have negative effect on LE, while IQ, TI and GDP have positive effect on LE. These findings present enormous contributions, significant research implications to BRICS nations and development literature, and policy implications for LE of BRICS economies.
Keywords: Geopolitical risk, CO2 emissions, Institutional quality, Life Expectancy, BRICS, CS-ARDL
Received: 20 Jun 2025; Accepted: 09 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhan, Yin and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Xiaolan Zhang, zhangxiaolan2025@126.com
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