Did politics matter? Municipal public health expenditure in the 1930s

Urban History ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 360-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Powell

This paper examines the relatively neglected topic of municipal public health expenditure in the inter-war period, and emphasizes two neglected dimensions: the political and the geographical. After justifying the importance of the topic and the approach and giving some details of municipal public health provision, a quantitative analysis of expenditure in the urban county boroughs is presented. In general, the analysis tends to argue against conventional wisdom in stressing the political dimension instead of the economic dimension in explaining the pattern of expenditure, giving a positive answer to the question posed in the title.

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Kok Wooi Yap ◽  
Doris Padmini Selvaratnam

This study aims to investigate the determinants of public health expenditure in Malaysia. An Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach proposed by Pesaran & Shin (1999) and Pesaran et al. (2001) is applied to analyse annual time series data during the period from 1970 to 2017. The study focused on four explanatory variables, namely per capita gross domestic product (GDP), healthcare price index, population aged 65 years and above, as well as infant mortality rate. The bounds test results showed that the public health expenditure and its determinants are cointegrated. The empirical results revealed that the elasticity of government health expenditure with respect to national income is less than unity, indicating that public health expenditure in Malaysia is a necessity good and thus the Wagner’s law does not exist to explain the relationship between public health expenditure and economic growth in Malaysia. In the long run, per capita GDP, healthcare price index, population aged more than 65 years, and infant mortality rate are the important variables in explaining the behaviour of public health expenditure in Malaysia. The empirical results also prove that infant mortality rate is significant in influencing public health spending in the short run. It is noted that macroeconomic and health status factors assume an important role in determining the public health expenditure in Malaysia and thus government policies and strategies should be made by taking into account of these aspects.


Economies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Micheal Kofi Boachie ◽  
K. Ramu ◽  
Tatjana Põlajeva

The effect of government spending on population’s health has received attention over the past decades. This study re-examines the link between government health expenditures and health outcomes to establish whether government intervention in the health sector improves outcomes. The study uses annual data for the period 1980–2014 on Ghana. The ordinary least squares (OLS) and the two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimators are employed for analyses; the regression estimates are then used to conduct cost-effectiveness analysis. The results show that, aside from income, public health expenditure contributed to the improvements in health outcomes in Ghana for the period. We find that, overall, increasing public health expenditure by 10% averts 0.102–4.4 infant and under-five deaths in every 1000 live births while increasing life expectancy at birth by 0.77–47 days in a year. For each health outcome indicator, the effect of income dominates that of public spending. The cost per childhood mortality averted ranged from US$0.20 to US$16, whereas the cost per extra life year gained ranged from US$7 to US$593.33 (2005 US$) during the period. Although the health effect of income outweighs that of public health spending, high (and rising) income inequality makes government intervention necessary. In this respect, development policy should consider raising health sector investment inter alia to improve health conditions.


Author(s):  
Mirela Cristea ◽  
Gratiela Georgiana Noja ◽  
Petru Stefea ◽  
Adrian Lucian Sala

Population aging and public health expenditure mainly dedicated to older dependent persons present major challenges for the European Union (EU) Member States, with profound implications for their economies and labor markets. Sustainable economic development relies on a well-balanced workforce of young and older people. As this balance shifts in favor of older people, productivity tends to suffer, on the one hand, and the older group demands more from health services, on the other hand. These requisites tend to manifest differently within developed and developing EU countries. This research aimed to assess population aging impacts on labor market coordinates (employment rate, labor productivity), in the framework of several health dimensions (namely, health government expenditure, hospital services, healthy life years, perceived health) and other economic and social factors. The analytical approach consisted of applying structural equation models, Gaussian graphical models, and macroeconometric models (robust regression and panel corrected standard errors) to EU panel data for the years 1995–2017. The results show significant dissimilarities between developed and developing EU countries, suggesting the need for specific policies and strategies for the labor market integration of older people, jointly with public health expenditure, with implications for EU labor market performance.


Author(s):  
Arthur Evariste KOUASSI ◽  
Ya Assanhoun Guillaume KOUASSI ◽  
Nogbou Andetchi Aubin AMANZOU

Infant mortality is a major health problem in developing countries. It is an important indicator of a country's public health as it goes hand in hand with socio-economic conditions and many others. Public health spending has been committed to reducing this scourge. This has led to the completion of numerous studies which have yielded mixed results. The main objective of this study is to test the effect of public health expenditure (% GDP) on the infant mortality rate, taking into account the role that institutional quality can play. To achieve this, we use two approaches which are the autoregressive vector panel model with exogenous variables (PVAR (X)) and the smooth threshold regression model (PSTR) on annual data covering the period 2002-2016 and covering 37 African countries. Sub-Saharan. Our main results through the PVAR (X) reveal that in the absence of institutional variables, public health expenditure has a negative and significant effect on the infant mortality rate, whereas, in the presence of the various institutional variables, this effect is still negative but is no longer significant. Our results show that the presence of institutions halves the weight of public health expenditure in explaining the infant mortality rate. In addition, our results show through the PSTR that there is a certain level of institutional qualities that these countries must achieve for public health expenditure to positively affect infant mortality rates. These thresholds oscillate for all the institutional variables around 7%. Taking institutional variables into account will help reduce infant mortality in Sub-Saharan African countries.


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