Estimating the effect of health care facilities and expenditure on health status in India

Abstract

This paper aims at finding the effect of public health care facilities and health expenditure on health indicators, namely, death rate and infant mortality rate during the period from 2007 to 2012 in India. Public health care system in India comprises of three tiers: Primary, Secondary and Tertiary tier. Here, the focus is upon primary and secondary tier of health care delivery. Trends in health care facilities and health indicators are analysed. To measure the effect of primary and secondary tier of health care facilities on death rate and infant mortality rate, a panel regression model with fixed effects is estimated. Also, to measure the efficacy of health care facilities in generating better health outcomes, this paper estimates the efficiency scores for selected health inputs using stochastic frontier analysis approach.