Aggregate health care expenditure in the United States: new results

Abstract

This research note, upon rectifying some inadvertently transposed entries in the observation matrix which was used in the authors' original article (Murthy and Ukpolo, 1994), using the maximum likelihood technique investigates whether in the United States during the period 1960–87, real per capita health care expenditure is related to real per capita income, the age structure of the population, number of practicing physicians, the relative price of health care and the ratio of public health care expenditure to total health care expenditure. While new results reveal the presence of two cointegrating vectors, the basic findings are consistent with the empirical evidence reported in the original paper.