The Impact of Public Health Expenditure on Health Outcomes in South Africa.

Besuthu Hlafa,Dumisani Macdonald Hompashe,Kin Sibanda

doi:10.3390/ijerph16162993

Abstract

Health holds an important position in maintaining economic development since it is both a prerequisite for and an outcome of economic development. This means that health contributes greatly to the attainment of sustainable development and health outcomes. The importance of health is demonstrated in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) where three of the eight goals are aimed at improving health outcomes. Despite progress made by other middle-income countries in achieving health-related MDGs, South Africa is still worse off in respect of health outcomes and experiences a challenge in attaining positive outcomes for these goals. This study’s main focus was to identify the association between public health expenditure and health outcomes in South Africa’s nine provinces from 2002 to 2016. The study implemented fixed effects and a random effects panel data estimation technique to control for time effects and individual provincial heterogeneity. This was followed by employing the Hausman specification test to identify the fixed effects model as the appropriate estimator for the study. The study also employed the seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) model and the least squares dummy variable (LSDV) model to examine the impact of public health expenditure on each province separately. The findings elucidated that the relationship between public health expenditure and health outcomes in South Africa varied across provinces depending on provincial management and infrastructure availability.

Highlights

The democratic South African government in 1994 had one task, among many, to provide primary healthcare (PHC) for every South African
To answer the broader objective of this study as outlined in the introductory section, this study employed panel data analysis with three basic regression methods. Of these three (fixed effects (FE), random effects (RE) and pooled OLS), one was the appropriate estimator for the study and others were not, depending on the type of data or N and T dimensions employed in this study, all of which is presented
With the p-value being less than 5% (0.05), the null hypothesis that random effect is the appropriate model for the study could be rejected

Summary

Introduction

The democratic South African government in 1994 had one task, among many, to provide primary healthcare (PHC) for every South African. The government’s central task was to address the disempowerment, discrimination, and underdevelopment that had weakened the healthcare system over the past few decades [1]. According to the World Health Organization, access to basic healthcare can be described in terms of financial coverage, which refers to social protection from financial and socio-economic challenges of access to health, population coverage, and service coverage. The Redistribution and Development Programme (RDP), which was the government’s primary socio-economic program, recognized the importance and value of PHC as an essential part of its strategy [4]. The new government had succeeded in addressing some of the areas of interest in the healthcare system in post-1994 South Africa

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion