Health aspects of human capital differentiation in Poland. The regional approach

Abstract

The objective of the article is to determine the level and asses the spatial dif-ferentiation of human capital defined in the area of health quality and expenses for health per capita. The analysis was carried out in spatial terms at the NUTS 2 level for the years 2013—2015; the main source of data was the Local Data Bank of Statistics Poland. Taxonomic hierarchization methods (model-free) and classification of multi-feature objects were used. As a result, each object has been assigned a synthetic measure — relative indicator of the level of human capital defined in the area of health quality and a relative indicator of the level of expenses on health per capita. It has been assumed that the distribution of human capital is uneven and remains in relation to the amount of expenses on health care and that higher expenses on health care are borne in regions with a relatively lower human capital. The results of the analyses positively verify the existence of spatial diversity of human capital and expenses on health care, both in relation to individual diagnostic variables and to synthetic measures. However, they did not confirm the relationship between the spatial distributions of the analyzed features. Keywords: human capital, health, differentiation, region.