Relationship between mortality and health care expenditure: Sustainable assessment of health care system

Abstract

Infant and maternal mortality are important indicators for assessing the quality of healthcare systems. The World Health Organization underscores the importance of proper health care system in reducing preventable mortality through early intervention. Early intervention includes availability, accessibility and affordability of health care systems for children and mothers. While there are several studies that assess the immediate and underlying drivers of child mortality, literature on the role of policy measures are limited and inconsistent. Thus, robust empirical analysis of the determinants of maternal and infant mortality remains inconclusive in the era of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Here, we examined the influence of health expenditure on infant and maternal deaths for the period 2000–2015 across 177 countries. Using panel Quantile Regression with bootstrapping, this study accounted for the 2007–2008 financial crisis in an empirical relationship between health outcome and health expenditure. We found a negative effect of health expenditure on mortality across all percentiles. Infant mortality rate declines between 0.19% - 1.45% while maternal mortality rate declines ranging from 0.09% - 1.91%. To attain the goal of ensuring healthy lives and wellbeing of all people (SDG 3), this study infers that health expenditure potentially reduces maternal and infant mortality across lower and middle income countries. We highlight the need for an enhanced health care expenditure, especially in developing countries to curb the levels of infant and maternal deaths.

Politics, government health expenditure and infant mortality: does political party orientation matter?

“…More specifically, the empirical results show that the relationship between government health expenditure (govhealthex) and infant mortality is robust and statistically significant with varying degrees of negative impact across the five quantiles for each of the models estimated. Our results suggest that at least for the set of counties in our sample, effective allocation of government health expenditure will indeed reduce infant mortality, a finding in line with Rana et al (2018), Nicholas et al (2016), Rahman et al (2018) and Owusu et al (2021) but inconsistent with the study of Akinlo and Sulola (2019).…”

The nexus between COVID-19 deaths, air pollution and economic growth in New York state: Evidence from Deep Machine Learning

“…Demand for healthy and clean natural environment fosters an excellent opportunity for wealth-creation and general employment ( Liu and Lim, 2017 , Owusu et al, 2021 ). For instance, employment can be created in agricultural sector tasked with the protection and management of natural resources and industries geared towards the mitigation of economic challenges.…”

The impact of health expenditure on environmental quality: the case of BRICS

“…The existing literature notes that air pollution has numerous adverse health outcomes and welfare costs that impact long-term economic sustainability and human development (Ganda 2021; Owusu and Sarkodie 2020). Furthermore, global variations in health expenditure have also resulted in changes in maternal and infant morbidity and mortality (Owusu, Sarkodie, and Pedersen 2021). However, there is a paucity of research on the impact of both aggregate and disaggregate health expenditure on environmental pollution.…”