Government health expenditures and health outcomes

Farasat Bokhari, Yunwei Gai and Pablo Gottret

Health Economics, 2007, vol. 16, issue 3, 257-273

Abstract: This paper provides econometric evidence linking a country's per capita government health expenditures and per capita income to two health outcomes: under‐five mortality and maternal mortality. Using instrumental variables techniques (GMM‐H2SL), we estimate the elasticity of these outcomes with respect to government health expenditures and income while treating both variables as endogenous. Consequently, our elasticity estimates are larger in magnitude than those reported in literature, which may be biased up. The elasticity of under‐five mortality with respect to government expenditures ranges from −0.25 to −0.42 with a mean value of −0.33. For maternal mortality the elasticity ranges from −0.42 to −0.52 with a mean value of −0.50. For developing countries, our results imply that while economic growth is certainly an important contributor to health outcomes, government spending on health is just as important a factor. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Date: 2007
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (101)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.1157

Related works:
Working Paper: Government Health Expenditures and Health Outcomes (2006)
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:wly:hlthec:v:16:y:2007:i:3:p:257-273

Access Statistics for this article

Health Economics is currently edited by Alan Maynard, John Hutton and Andrew Jones

More articles in Health Economics from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().