Health Care Expenditure and Income: A Global Perspective

Badi Baltagi, Raffaele Lagravinese, Francesco Moscone and Elisa Tosetti

No 6091, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: This paper investigates the long-run economic relationship between health care expenditure and income in the world using data on 167 countries over the period 1995-2012, collected from the World Bank data set. The analysis is carried using panel data methods that allow one to account for unobserved heterogeneity, temporal persistence, and crosssection dependence in the form of either a common factor model or a spatial process. We estimate a global measure of income elasticity using all countries in the sample, and for sub-groups of countries, depending on their geo-political area and income. Our findings suggest that at the global level, health care is a necessity rather than a luxury. However, results vary greatly depending on the sub-sample analysed. Our findings seem to suggest that size of income elasticity depends on the position of different countries in the global income distribution, with poorer countries showing higher elasticity.

Keywords: health expenditure; panels; income elasticity; world; exploring the geography of health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C31 C33 H51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp6091.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Health Care Expenditure and Income: A Global Perspective (2017)
Working Paper: The Health Care Expenditure and Income: A Global Perspective (2016)
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:ces:ceswps:_6091

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().