When growth is not enough: Income thresholds, clean energy transition, and the asymmetric health burden of air pollution in Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia is exposed to two distinct air-pollution pathways: ambient particulate matter, partly shaped by transboundary haze, and household solid-fuel cooking, which is closely tied to energy poverty. This study proposes a Dual-Pathway Energy-Pollution-Health framework that combines Grossman’s health capital model with an extended Environmental Kuznets Curve logic, and examines it with an eleven-country ASEAN panel for 2000 to 2023 and a 2019 cross-section of mortality attributed to ambient and household air pollution. Because the number of countries is small, inference relies on wild cluster bootstrap procedures, simulated critical values for unit root tests, and a bootstrap cointegration test. Income is positively associated with life expectancy, although statistical significance weakens under small-cluster inference and the evidence for a stable long-run relationship is moderate and sensitive to the lag structure. A Hansen threshold model identifies an income level at which the association between renewable electricity share and life expectancy changes from statistically null to negative, a pattern that is stable across robustness checks and is read as reflecting national grid composition. Cross-sectional estimates indicate a larger income elasticity for household than for ambient mortality under most estimators, although a rank-based estimator does not reproduce this ordering. Mediation results depend on the control set, and panel Granger tests indicate predictive content in both directions between income and life expectancy. The evidence is therefore suggestive and conditional on the data limitations discussed.