The objective of the paper is to review and analyze the health of population and health care expenditure and to examine the trends of convergence of health care expenditure in EU countries. One of the most often used indicators characterizing a populations health is life expectancy at birth. Comparative analyses show that the life expectancy at birth in EU-12 countries is much lower than in EU-15 countries. Although in 1992-2004 the life expectancy increased both in EU-15 countries and in EU-12 countries, the differences in the life expectancy have still remained more or less the same. Besides the low life expectancy in EU-12 countries, also the resources used in health care are below the EU-15 average level. In our paper we test the ?-, ?- and ?-convergence of the health care expenditure. For testing ?-, ?- and ?-convergence the authors have used cross-sectional data over the period 1992-2004 for health care expenditure as share of GDP and per capita health care expenditure. Data of the World Health Organization (WHO) were used for the research. The study demonstrates that although usually the increase of economic integration facilitates economic growth, the mere fact of the European Union enlargement does not bring along an automatic homogenization of health care expenditure and health policy in the EU-12 countries.
Expenditure on social protection in the European Union (EU) member states has been increasing rapidly over the last decade. To cover the increasing expenses, the countries need to find ways to increase revenues. Social protection financing systems and structure of financing vary across countries, but all of them use mainly two sources for financing: general government contributions and social tax revenue. The aim of this paper is to study the development of the structure of social protection financing at the main contributor level over the last decade, defining the trends that characterize the changes. We concentrate on convergence analysis of the structure of social protection financing, which is an important but, so far, insufficiently studied issue. Copyright International Atlantic Economic Society 2005H55, H53, O52,
The article discusses latent school choice developments in the two neighboring countries, Finland and Estonia, investigating the impact of school choice regime on educational returns. To support the discussion we conducted a comparative study of 21 education systems in Europe and explored whether there might be an association between educational returns and the extent of school choice and equal educational opportunities. Educational returns are operationalized by the PISA 2009 country level score, school choice and unequal educational opportunities indices are constructed by applying the first principal component over multiple variables.
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