An empirical study on the determinants of health care expenses in emerging economies
- PDF / 1,718,002 Bytes
- 16 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 102 Downloads / 199 Views
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Open Access
An empirical study on the determinants of health care expenses in emerging economies Lulin Zhou, Sabina Ampon-Wireko* , Henry Asante Antwi, Xinglong Xu, Muhammad Salman, Maxwell Opuni Antwi and Tordzro Mary Norvienyo Afua
Abstract Background: Emerging countries continue to suffer gravely from insufficient healthcare funding, which adversely affects access to quality healthcare and ultimately the health status of citizens. By using panel data from the World Development Indicators, the study examined the determinants of health care expenditure among twenty-two (22) emerging countries from the year 2000 to 2018. Methods: The study employed cross-section dependence and homogeneity tests to confirm cross-sectional dependence and to deal with homogeneity issues. The Quantile regression technique is employed to test for the relationship between private and public health care expenses and its determinants. The Pooled mean group causality test is used to examine the causal connections among the variables. Results: The outcome of the quantile regression test revealed that economic growth and aging population could induce healthcare costs in emerging countries. However, the impact of industrialization, agricultural activities, and technological advancement on health expenses are found to be noticeably heterogeneous at the various quantile levels. Unidirectional causality was found between industrialization and public health expenses; whereas two-way causal influence was reveled amongst public health expenditure and GDP per capita; public health expenditure and agricultural activities. Conclusion: It is therefore suggested that effective and integrated strategies should be considered by industries and agricultural sectors to help reduce preventable diseases that will ultimately reduce healthcare costs among the emerging countries. Keywords: Health care expenditure, Industrialization, Agricultural activities, Economic growth, Quantile regression
* Correspondence: [email protected] School of Management, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang 212013, P. R. China © The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.or
Data Loading...
