scholarly journals The role of access to electricity, female education, and public health expenditure on female health outcomes: evidence from SAARC-ASEAN countries

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Mafizur Rahman ◽  
Khosrul Alam

Abstract Background The importance of the status of female health should have research priority due to the unique medical needs of women. Hence this paper attempts to explore the nexus of access to electricity, female education, and public health expenditure with female health outcomes in the SAARC-ASEAN countries. Methods Using the data of 2002–2018, and applying the cross-sectional dependence test, Modified Wald test, Wooldridge test, the Panel corrected standard error (PCSE) model, the Feasible generalized least square (FGLS) model, and the pair-wise Granger causality test, the robust outcomes on female health are found. Results Access to electricity, female education rate, public health expenditure, economic growth, and immunization rate, all have a positive effect on female life expectancy at birth, and a negative effect on the female adult mortality rate. The urbanization rate has a significantly positive impact on female life expectancy at birth but an insignificant impact on female adult mortality rate. The one-way causal relationship between the variables are also revealed. Conclusions All the results are rational and have important milestone for the health sector. The health status of females should be improved and protected by formulating effective policies on access to electricity, female education, public health expenditure, immunization, economic growth, and urbanization.

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):  
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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