title: Why do some countries spend more for health? An assessment of sociopolitical determinants and international aid for government health expenditures.
abstract: A consensus exists that rising income levels and technological development are among key drivers of total health spending. Determinants of public sector health expenditure, by contrast, are less well understood. This study examines a complex relationship across government health expenditure (GHE), sociopolitical risks, and international aid, while taking into account the impacts of national income, debt and tax financing and aging populations on health spending. We apply a fixed-effects two-stage least squares regression method to a panel dataset comprising 120 countries for the years 1995 through 2010. Our results show that democratic accountability has a diminishing positive correlation with GHE, and that levels of GHE are higher when government is more stable. Corruption is associated with less GHE in developing countries, but with higher GHE in developed countries. We also find that development assistance for health (DAH) is fungible with domestically financed government health expenditure (DGHE). For an average country, a 1% increase in DAH to government is associated with a 0.03-0.04% decrease in DGHE. Furthermore, the degree of fungibility of DAH to government is higher in countries where corruption or ethnic tensions are widespread. However, DAH to non-governmental organizations is not fungible with DGHE.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Hospital and Health Care Administration, National Yang-Ming University, No. 155, Sec. 2, Linong St., Beitou District, Taipei 112, Taiwan. Electronic address: j6921@ms19.hinet.net.
authors.forename: Li-Lin
authors.initials: LL
authors.lastname: Liang
authors.affiliation: Department of International Health, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, 615 N. Wolfe St., Baltimore, MD 21205, USA.
authors.forename: Andrew J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Mirelman
mesh_terms: D019049:Developed Countries / Q000191:economics*; D003906:Developing Countries / Q000191:economics*; D005380:Financing, Government; D005102:Health Expenditures / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D007391:International Cooperation; D011057:Politics; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors
keywords: Corruption; Cross-country; Democracy; Fungibility; Government health expenditure; Government quality; Health aid