Suchergebnisse

The authors examine the trajectory of health expenditures in Latin American countries. The authors apply standard fixed effects and dynamic models to explore the factors associated with the growth of total health expenditures as well as its main components namely, government health expenditures and out-of-pocket payments. Their results suggest that, after taking other factors into consideration, health expenditures in general do not grow faster than the Gross National Product (GNP). The authors confirm the existence of fungibility, where external aid for health reduces government health spending and out-of-pocket expenses from domestic sources. The study also finds that government health expenditure and out-of-pocket payments follow the same paths in time but vary for countries at different levels of economic development; the same is true for health expenditure growth.