Health expenditure, longevity, and child mortality: dynamic panel data approach with global data

Area of Science:

• Public Health
• Health Economics
• Global Health

Background:

• Understanding the impact of health expenditures on population health outcomes is crucial for effective policy-making.
• Global health disparities necessitate an analysis of factors influencing life expectancy and infant mortality.
• Previous research often utilized complex estimators, prompting the exploration of newer, potentially more efficient methods.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze the effects of public and private health expenditures on life expectancy at birth and infant mortality.
• To compare the relative effectiveness of public versus private health spending on global health indicators.
• To evaluate the performance of novel dynamic panel model estimators in analyzing health expenditure effects.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of a global dataset encompassing 195 countries from 1995-2014.
• Categorization of countries based on life expectancy growth, infant mortality rate decrease, and gross national income per capita.
• Application of new dynamic panel model estimators, compared to traditional GMM estimators.

Main Results:

• Public health expenditures demonstrate a generally stronger positive effect on health outcomes (life expectancy, infant mortality) than private expenditures.
• The health-promoting impact of public health spending, while significant, was found to be less pronounced than that of primary education.
• The novel dynamic panel estimators provided valuable insights but did not exhibit the desired robustness across all analyses.

Conclusions:

• Public health investments are more effective in improving population health than private health expenditures.
• Primary education remains a critical and highly effective intervention for enhancing global health outcomes.
• While promising, further refinement of new dynamic panel estimators is needed to ensure robust and reliable global health expenditure analysis.