The effect of older population on public health spending:Evidence from Spain

ackground:The gradual ageing of the population,and its effect on public spending,constitutes an urgent challenge for advanced economies.Through this study,we analyse the effect of older people,and their health and individual characteristics,on public health spending.Methods:Using logistic regression methods,we have analysed the use of different health services and health technologies by older people in Spain,controlled for several health,socioeconomic,and other individual factors.Results:The main factors that explain the consumption of both health services and health technology,above age,are related to the so-called need factors:self-reported health status,presence of chronic diseases,and disability.Conclusion:Knowing the main factors that imply greater public health spending is a topic of special interest for designing efficient health policies,in a context of growth in public health spending.In this way,preventive attention on the so-called need factors may be an important driver to improve the effectiveness of spending.

Reassessing the Empirical Relationship between Health Expenditure,Governance and Economic Growth in Africa:Analysis of Nigerian

As an aspect of human capital,a positive association exists amongst health,productivity,and growth in output per capita.On the other hand,social infrastructure defined by the institution of governance has a direct effect on the environment upon which productive activities take place to determine outcomes.Nigeria like most African countries is bedevilled by the high prevalence of inadequate health financing and poor governance.Health financing for Nigeria consistently has fallen short of the AU health funding commitment of 15%of annual budgetary allocation to the health sector.Secondly,poor governance conditions available resources and shape the state of infrastructure,particularly health infrastructure and socioeconomic conditions.In turn,this determines individuals’level of exposure to health risks and their capacity to actively contribute to productive activity for growth stimulation and sustainability.Against this backdrop,this study added to the existing literature in the context of Nigeria,by theoretically applying the Solow augmented Mankiw-Romer-Weil structural model in the examination of the impact of government size and governance quality in the health sector,on economic growth.Autoregressive Distributed Lag(ARDL)model was adopted in the estimation.Findings show that governance quality adversely affects growth and this reduces the capacity of health spending to stimulate growth by an almost equal margin.As a result,this study recommends legislative backing to the AU health funding commitment in Nigeria.

On the nexus of environmental quality and public spending on health care in China:a panel cointegration analysis

Does pollution drive up public spending on health care?This paper aims to answer such a crucial question empirically using a panel data set of 31 Chinese provinces during the period 1997–2014.In particular,this paper explores the non-stationarity and cointegration properties between health care expenditure and environmental indicators in a panel cointegration framework;in doing so,it examines both the long-run and the short-run impacts of the per capita provincial GDP,waste gas emissions,dust and smog emissions,and waste water emissions on the per capita public health expenditure.We apply panel unit root tests,heterogeneous panel cointegration tests,FMOLS techniques,and a panel-based error-correction model.The conclusion is that,both in the long run and in the short run,public health care expenditure is positively affected not only by the provincial economy but also by the environmental quality.