Health Expenditures And Life Expectancy Around The World: A Quantile Regression Approach

Maksym Obrizan and George L. Wehby
Additional contact information
George L. Wehby: University of Iowa

No 47, Discussion Papers from Kyiv School of Economics

Abstract: Previous literature has produced mixed results on the effects of country health expenditures on longevity. More importantly, all previous studies have evaluated the expenditure effects on the mean of the life expectancy distribution, ignoring the possibility that the expenditure returns may not be the same for countries that differ in their life expectancies. In this paper, we evaluate the heterogeneity in country health expenditure effects throughout the life expectancy distribution applying quantile regression to an assembled dataset of 177 countries. We find significant heterogeneities in expenditures effects on life expectancy that are completely masked by ordinary least squares (OLS), which underestimates (overestimates) the expenditure returns for countries ranking at low (high) life-expectancy quantiles. The largest returns from increased spending are for countries at the left margin of the life expectancy distribution (mainly at quantiles 0.25 and lower), for which a $100 increase in per capita spending leads to 11.5 and 11 months of life for males and females, respectively. The results suggest that increasing healthcare spending in these countries may have significant population-wide life expectancy returns.

Keywords: Health Expenditures; Life Expectancy; Quantile Regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C2 I1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-hea
Note: Revise and Resubmit to Health Economics
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.kse.org.ua/pdf/KSE_dp47.pdf January 2012 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
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:kse:dpaper:47

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Kyiv School of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Iryna Sobetska ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).