Abstract
The huge regional disparity in government health expenditures (GHE) is a major policy concern in China. This paper addresses whether provincial GHE converges in China from 1997 to 2009 using the economic convergence framework based on neoclassical economic growth theory. Our empirical investigation provides compelling evidence of long-term convergence in provincial GHE within China, but not in short-term. Policy implications of these empirical results are discussed.
Highlights
Health is human beings’ basic need and belongs to human beings’ ‘‘substantial freedom’’ [1]
Since this study aims to examine the regional disparity in government health expenditure (GHE), we focus on the latter one which accounts for 98.4% of total GHE in 2009
This paper applies the concept of convergence from the neoclassical economic growth theory to test whether the Chinese provincial GHE converge during 1997 to 2009
Summary
Health is human beings’ basic need and belongs to human beings’ ‘‘substantial freedom’’ [1]. Health has strong positive externalities and plays an important role in promoting social and economic development [2,3,4]. Improving the population health is one of the most important social objectives of most governments around the world today. More expenditure on health does not guarantee better health outcome, governments usually focus on the operational measure of promoting equality of government health expenditure (GHE) on a sub-country level. In 2000, WHO ranked China 188th out of the 191 Member States in terms of fairness of financial contribution to health systems [9]
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