Government Health Expenditures and Health Outcomes

Farasat Bokhari, Yunwei Gai () and Pablo Gottret ()
Additional contact information
Yunwei Gai: Department of Economics, Florida State University
Pablo Gottret: Health Systems Development Cluster, World Bank

No wp2005_02_01, Working Papers from Department of Economics, Florida State University

Abstract: This paper provides econometric evidence linking a country's per capita government health expenditures and per capita income to two health outcomes: under-five mortality and maternal mortality. Using instrumental variables techniques (GMM-H2SL), we estimate the elasticity of these outcomes with respect to government health expenditures and income while treating both variables as endogenous. Consequently, our elasticity estimates are larger in magnitude than those reported in literature, which may be biased up. The elasticity of under-five mortality with respect to government expenditures ranges from -.25 to -.42 with a mean value of -.33. For maternal mortality the elasticity ranges from -.42 to -.52 with a mean value of -.50. For developing countries, our results imply that while economic growth is certainly an important contributor to health outcomes, government spending on health is just as important a factor.

Keywords: Under-five mortality; maternal-mortality; millennium development goals; government expenditures; elasticity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23
Date: 2005-02, Revised 2006-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-pbe
Note: Forthcoming in Health Economics.
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/hec.1157 First version, 2005-02 (application/pdf)
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Related works:
Journal Article: Government health expenditures and health outcomes (2007)
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