Oleksii Havrylenko
Air pollution remains a major global health challenge, with its burden closely linked to the structure and resilience of national energy systems. This study aims to assess the impact of energy security on air pollution-related health outcomes, measured by Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs), across countries while capturing both contemporaneous and dynamic effects. The analysis is based on a balanced panel dataset of 125 countries over the period 2000–2023 (3,000 observations) and employs fixed-effects panel models with time effects, Driscoll–Kraay standard errors, and lagged specifications using a log-transformed DALY variable. The results reveal a robust negative relationship between energy security and health burden. In the baseline model, a one-point increase in the Energy Security Score reduces DALYs by approximately 2.2% (β = −0.022, p < 0.001). After controlling for global time dynamics, the effect decreases to about 0.5% (β = −0.005, p < 0.001), while model explanatory power increases from R² = 0.20 to R² = 0.57, highlighting the importance of global trends. Lagged estimates confirm short-term persistence, with a one-year lag effect of −0.0208 (p < 0.001) in the baseline and −0.0042 (p < 0.001) with time effects, indicating that improvements in energy security continue to reduce DALYs in the subsequent period. However, distributed lag results show that only the first lag is statistically significant, suggesting that the health benefits of energy security materialise quickly and do not accumulate over longer time horizons.