Health expenditure and economic growth - a review of the literature and an analysis between the economic community for central African states (CEMAC) and selected African countries

Serge Piabuo () and Julius Chupezi Tieguhong ()
Additional contact information
Julius Chupezi Tieguhong: World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF)

Health Economics Review, 2017, vol. 7, issue 1, 1-13

Abstract: Abstract African leaders accepted in the year 2001 through the Abuja Declaration to allocate 15% of their government expenditure on health but by 2013 only five (5) African countries achieved this target. In this paper, a comparative analysis on the impact of health expenditure between countries in the CEMAC sub-region and five other African countries that achieved the Abuja declaration is provided. Data for this study was extracted from the World Development Indicators (2016) database, panel ordinary least square (OLS), fully modified ordinary least square (FMOLS) and dynamic ordinary least square (DOLS) were used as econometric technic of analysis. Results showed that health expenditure has a positive and significant effect on economic growth in both samples. A unit change in health expenditure can potentially increase GDP per capita by 0.38 and 0.3 units for the five other African countries that achieve the Abuja target and for CEMAC countries respectively, a significant difference of 0.08 units among the two samples. In addition, a long-run relationship also exist between health expenditure and economic growth for both groups of countries. Thus African Economies are strongly advised to achieve the Abuja target especially when other socio-economic and political factors are efficient.

Keywords: Human capital; Health expenditure; Economic growth; Abuja declaration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (52)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1186/s13561-017-0159-1 Abstract (text/html)

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:spr:hecrev:v:7:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1186_s13561-017-0159-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/13561

DOI: 10.1186/s13561-017-0159-1

Access Statistics for this article

Health Economics Review is currently edited by J. Matthias Graf von der Schulenburg

More articles in Health Economics Review from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().