Abstract Surrounding natural environments, especially green space and forests, are considered beneficial to our physical and psychological health. Nevertheless, their contributions to our health expenditure are limitedly investigated in the literature to date. The goal of this paper is to explore associations between health spending and forest environments at the prefectural level in Japan. Fully considering cross-sectional dependence and non-stationarity of the variables, my empirical analysis revealed that mixed forest coverage and urban-forest proximity would have significantly inverse long-run effects on per capita health expenditure. These findings would support current domestic forest policies from public health perspectives. Whereas, no empirical evidences of the short-run health impacts of these forest indicators were found in this study. Also, other forest indicators, i.e. overall, evergreen and deciduous forest coverage as well as regional vegetation diversity, were found to be insignificant in determining health expenditure.

中文翻译：

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卫生支出与森林环境关联的实证分析：以日本为例

摘要 周围的自然环境，尤其是绿地和森林，被认为有益于我们的身心健康。然而，迄今为止，文献中对它们对我们健康支出的贡献的研究有限。本文的目的是探索日本县级卫生支出与森林环境之间的关联。充分考虑变量的横截面依赖性和非平稳性，我的实证分析表明，混合森林覆盖率和城市森林距离将对人均卫生支出产生显着的长期反向影响。这些发现将从公共卫生的角度支持当前的国内森林政策。然而，在本研究中没有发现这些森林指标的短期健康影响的经验证据。