Background
The proportion of older people in many countries, including Poland, is expected to increase, which will lead to a rise in healthcare costs.
Objectives
This study aims to analyse the impact of older adults’ physical activity on public spending on healthcare in Poland over the long term.
Method
To include the physical activity factor needed for our long-term projections, we modified the macro-simulation model used by the European Commission in Poland. We used the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe database to calculate the number of healthcare users depending on their level of physical activity. We used three measures of healthcare users: people with chronic diseases, people who were in hospital or visited a doctor more than once in the previous year, and people who subjectively evaluated their health as fair or poor.
Results
We found that a higher level of physical activity in older adults is associated with lower public expenditure on healthcare for all measures adopted. However, the magnitude of this effect differed depending on the measure used, with gains ranging from 0.4 to 1.2% of gross domestic product per year by the end of the projection horizon.
Conclusion
Our findings provide a strong argument for social policy in Poland to intensify the promotion of physical activity in society to decrease future healthcare costs of older adults.
Central bank independence (CBI) and its link to inflation have become a part of conventional wisdom. However, the literature shows that there is a lack of a stable general pattern for the relation between CBI and inflation, even for relatively homogenous groups of countries. In this study, we use two indexes for CBI proposed in the literature. For the panel of 51 countries (24 advanced and 27 nonadvanced economies), we estimate two regression models—one with inflation as a dependent variable and another with inflation gap in this role. We use two estimation methods: the panel fixed effects model with serial autocorrelation in the error term and the Arellano‐Bond difference generalized method of moments estimator. In addition, we use disaggregated indices to check what aspects of independence are of highest importance. Our results suggest that CBI has a negative significant impact on inflation mostly by results for nonadvanced economies and that this relationship did not change during the recent crisis.
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