With the economic development of various countries and the deepening of population aging, health plays an increasingly important role in the macro-economy. How to meet the growing health needs as well as promote the economy has captured the attention of the world. Therefore, whether health investment can promote economic growth is an important theoretical and practical issue. An extended Mankiw–Romer–Weil model (MRW) with human health capital and population aging is employed to examine the impact on economic growth from population aging and health investment. On the basis of the theoretical model, this paper uses the LSDV and TSLS methods to carry out an empirical study based on cross-country panel data during the period 2000–2016. The empirical results show that health investment plays a significant role in promoting economic growth, and there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between population aging and economic growth. The impacts on economic growth from health investment and population aging can weaken each other. In addition, this paper also finds that health investment structure and the proportion of government health investment to total government spending can affect economic growth.

Rapid economic growth is accompanied by the continuous degradation of the environmental quality, low efficiency of natural-resource utilization and increasing health losses. With the growing environmental problems, countries in the world have gradually attached importance to environmental protection and regulation. As an effective means of environmental protection by the government, environmental regulation’s role in high-quality development cannot be understated. On the basis of a two-way fixed-effects model, the panel data of 276 prefecture-level cities of China during the period 2007–2016 were used to explore the effect of environmental regulation on China’s export technology structure, and the influence mechanism between the two. Moreover, panel quantile regression was used to examine the heterogeneity of the effect of environmental regulation on the export technology structures of Chinese cities with distinct technological levels. The empirical results prove that environmental regulation can boost the upgrade of China’s export technology structure by encouraging innovation. Furthermore, the impact of environmental regulation on China’s export technology structure changes according to the export technical complexity. With the improvement in the export technology structure, the boost effect appears as an inverted U-shaped change.