Is there any convergence in health expenditures across EU countries?

Claudiu Albulescu (), Cornel Oros and Aviral Tiwari

Economics Bulletin, 2017, vol. 37, issue 3, 2095-2101

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the degree of convergence in health expenditures for six EU countries over the time-span 1972 to 2013, namely Austria, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. To examine the convergence of health expenditures we rely on the health expenditures to GDP ratio group average. Different from previous essays, we draw a comparison between overall expenditure, governmental expenditure and private expenditure and we use recent developments in unit root testing of bounded series. Our findings show that the health expenditures spread from the group average follows in general a non-stationary process. We posit thus, there is no significant convergence in terms of health expenditures to GDP ratio, although there are few progresses in the case of the private sector for Finland and in the case of public sector, for Spain.

Keywords: health expenditures; convergence; bounded unit root tests; strict stationarity; EU countries (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C2 I1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-09-27
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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