The impact of public spending on health: does money matter?

Filmer, Deon; Pritchett, Lant

doi:10.1016/s0277-9536(99)00150-1

Cited by 559 publications

(565 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Using specifications similar to those in the existing literature, I find the result highlighted in the literature, which is that state health spending saves no lives (see Filmer and Pritchett 1999). However, restricting the sample to rural households (more than two-thirds of all) and conditioning upon state-specific trends, a significant effect emerges that is driven by the third lag of health expenditure.…”

Section: Motivation and Contextsupporting

confidence: 50%

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Spending to save? State health expenditure and infant mortality in India

Bhalotra

2007

Health Economics

108

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in Spending to Save? State Health Expenditure and Infant Mortality in IndiaSonia Bhalotra D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E S ABSTRACT Spending to Save? State Health Expenditure and Infant Mortality in India *There are severe inequalities in health in the world, poor health being concentrated amongst poor people in poor countries. Poor countries spend a much smaller share of national income on health expenditure than do richer countries. What potential lies in political or growth processes that raise this share? This depends upon how effective government health spending in developing countries is. Existing research presents little evidence of an impact on childhood mortality. Using specifications similar to those in the existing literature, this paper finds a similar result for India, which is that state health spending saves no lives. However, upon allowing lagged effects, controlling in a flexible way for trended unobservables and restricting the sample to rural households, a significant effect of health expenditure on infant mortality emerges, the long run elasticity being about -0.24. There are striking differences in the impact by social group. Slicing the data by gender, birth-order, religion, maternal and paternal education and maternal age at birth, I find the weakest effects in the most vulnerable groups (with the exception of a large effect for scheduled tribes). JEL Classification:I18, I38, O15, O12

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Section: Motivation and Contextsupporting

confidence: 50%

“…In an influential study, Filmer and Pritchett (1999) investigate the effect of government health expenditure on infant and under-5 mortality using cross-sectional data on 98 developing countries in 1992/3. They find a very small and statistically insignificant effect.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Spending to save? State health expenditure and infant mortality in India

Bhalotra

2007

Health Economics

108

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“…McGuire (2010: 9) notes that "voters in rich and poor countries alike tend to demand curative services excessively and preventive services insufficiently, so politicians who seek their support may well promise and implement policies that are not optimal for mortality decline." Many factors connive to inhibit the delivery of public services to the poor, attenuating the connection between social spending and human development (Filmer & Pritchett 1999;Ross 2006). …”

Section: Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Electoral Democracy and Human Development

et al. 2015

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Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a new approach to the conceptualization and measurement of democracy. It is co-hosted by the University of Gothenburg and University of Notre Dame. With a V-Dem Institute at University of Gothenburg that comprises almost ten staff members, and a project team across the world with four Principal Investigators, fifteen Project Managers, 30+ Regional Managers, 170 Country Coordinators, Research Assistants, and 2,500 Country Experts, the V-Dem project is one of the largest-ever social science research-oriented data collection programs.Please address comments and/or queries for information to: We draw on the new Varieties of Democracy dataset, which provides a highly differentiated set of democracy indicators, and a new collection of mortality data compiled by the Gapminder project. With these tools, we are able to conduct panel analyses that include most (semi-)sovereign countries from 1900 to the present -a much more extensive sample than has ever been mustered for this particular research question. We find that composite indices such as Polity have a tenuous relationship to human development, while indices focused on the electoral component of democracy yield a highly robust relationship.3

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“…There is evidence of the impact of economic growth on child mortality: looking across all countries, there is a strong negative correlation between a country's income per capita and child mortality (Cutler et al, 2006). So while inequalities and corruption may cause distortions due to inefficiencies and wastage of resources (Filmer and Pritchett, 1999;Rajkumar and Swaroop, 2008), the general pattern is that more money tends to produce better health-care systems. It is plausible that child mortality also impacts economic growth.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The demographic transition and economic growth: implications for development policy

2015

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An important transition in the economic history of countries occurs when they move from a regime of low prosperity, high child mortality and high fertility to a state of high prosperity, low child mortality and low fertility. Researchers have proposed various theories to explain this demographic transition and its relation to economic growth. In this article, we test the validity of some of these theories by fitting a non-linear dynamic model for the available cross-country data. Our approach fills the gap between the micro-level models that discuss causative mechanisms but do not consider if alternative models may fit the data well, and models from growth econometrics that show the impact of different factors on economic growth but do not include non-linearities and complex interactions. In our model, mortality and fertility decline and economic growth are endogenized by considering a simultaneous system of equations in the change variables. The model shows that the transition is best described in terms of a development cycle involving child mortality, fertility and GDP per capita. Fertility rate decreases when child mortality is low, and is weakly dependent on GDP. As fertility rates fall, GDP increases, and as GDP increases, child mortality falls. We further test the hypothesis that female education drives down fertility rates rather than child mortality, but find only weak evidence for it. The Bayesian methodology we use ensures robust models and we identify non-linear interactions between indicators to capture real-world nonlinearities. Hence, our models can be used in policymaking to predict short-term evolutions in the indicator variables. We also discuss how our approach can be used to evaluate policy initiatives such as the Millennium Development Goals or the Sustainable Development Goals and set more accurate, country-specific development targets.

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The impact of public spending on health: does money matter?

Cited by 559 publications

References 18 publications

Spending to save? State health expenditure and infant mortality in India

Spending to save? State health expenditure and infant mortality in India

Electoral Democracy and Human Development

The demographic transition and economic growth: implications for development policy

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