Health Care Expenditure across OECD Countries: A Public Choice Approach

Rosella Levaggi

Economia Internazionale / International Economics, 2000, vol. 53, issue 2, 203-219

Abstract: This paper presents a Public Choice model explaining the determinants of public and private health care expenditure for OECD countries. Public expenditure derives from a government supply model while the private counterpart is determined by the demand that the public sector cannot meet. The econometric estimations show that the oil crisis is a powerful factor in explaining health care expenditure and the differences in the observed growth rates. Private expenditure confirms its residual nature, but this effect might be asymmetric, i.e. private provision grows as a consequence of a decrease in the growth of public provision while the contrary is not necessarily true. From a policy point of view, the empirical estimations show that closed-end systems might control expenditure at macro level given the presence of a fixed budget constraint, but they have the effect of pushing expenditure up to its limit.

JEL-codes: H51 I11 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:ris:ecoint:0249

Access Statistics for this article

Economia Internazionale / International Economics is currently edited by Giovanni Battista Pittaluga

More articles in Economia Internazionale / International Economics from Camera di Commercio Industria Artigianato Agricoltura di Genova Via Garibaldi 4, 16124 Genova, Italy. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Angela Procopio ().