Spending to Save? State Health Expenditure and Infant Mortality in India

Sonia Bhalotra

No 2914, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: There are severe inequalities in health in the world, poor health being concentrated amongst poor people in poor countries. Poor countries spend a much smaller share of national income on health expenditure than do richer countries. What potential lies in political or growth processes that raise this share? This depends upon how effective government health spending in developing countries is. Existing research presents little evidence of an impact on childhood mortality. Using specifications similar to those in the existing literature, this paper finds a similar result for India, which is that state health spending saves no lives. However, upon allowing lagged effects, controlling in a flexible way for trended unobservables and restricting the sample to rural households, a significant effect of health expenditure on infant mortality emerges, the long run elasticity being about -0.24. There are striking differences in the impact by social group. Slicing the data by gender, birth-order, religion, maternal and paternal education and maternal age at birth, I find the weakest effects in the most vulnerable groups (with the exception of a large effect for scheduled tribes).

Keywords: infant mortality; India; poverty; health; public spending (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I18 I38 O12 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2007-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-dev and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (46)

Published - published in: Health Economics, 2007, 16 (9), 911-928

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp2914.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Spending to save? State health expenditure and infant mortality in India (2007)
Working Paper: Spending to Save? State Health Expenditure and Infant Mortality in India (2007)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp2914

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().