Aggregate Health Expenditures, National
Income, and Institutions for Private Property
Dino Falaschetti
May 26, 2005
Abstract
Health expenditures scholars argue that cross-country variation in
health spending is largely attributable to differences in national income.
Institutions and commitment scholars, on the other hand, Ūnd that "in-
stitutions for private property" (e.g., systems of checks and balances) can
significantly expand an economy's production possibilities. I synthesize
and extend these results by employing new methods to examine a large
cross-country dataset of health expenditures, national incomes, and in-
stitutional indexes. My main result - i.e., that institutions for private
property exhibit a more fundamental relationship with health expendi-
tures than does national income - should interest a wide audience. First,
health expenditures scholars may be interested in the relatively careful
estimates of aggregate incomes' relationship to health spending. Second,
institutions and commitment scholars should be interested in this result's
ability to evidence institutions' primacy in a heretofore overlooked, but
theoretically and substantively attractive, application. Finally, health
policy entrepreneurs may find important the implication that reforming
governance structures can be more productive for advancing health than
is directly funding associated services.
|
