Health Care Expenditure in the European Union Countries: New Insights about the Convergence Process

This paper assesses the convergence process in the health care expenditure for selected European Union (EU) countries over the past 50 years. As a novel contribution, we use bound unit root tests and, for robustness purposes, a series of tests for strict stationarity to provide new insights about th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal of environmental research and public health 2022-02, Vol.19 (4), p.1991
Main Author: Albulescu, Claudiu Tiberiu
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Austria
Convergence
Coronaviruses
COVID-19
Delivery of Health Care
European Union
GDP
Gross Domestic Product
Health care
Health care expenditures
Health Expenditures
Health services
Heterogeneity
Hypotheses
Literature reviews
Medical research
Pandemics
Per capita
Stationary processes
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Summary:This paper assesses the convergence process in the health care expenditure for selected European Union (EU) countries over the past 50 years. As a novel contribution, we use bound unit root tests and, for robustness purposes, a series of tests for strict stationarity to provide new insights about the convergence process. We make a comparison between public and private health expenditure per capita and as a percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP), with a focus on six EU countries with different health care systems in place. When we consider the health expenditure per capita, we report mixed findings. We show that the spread from the group average is stationary in the cases of Finland and Portugal when the overall and public expenditure is considered. In terms of private expenditure, the convergence process is noticed only for Austria. For all other countries included in our sample, we document a non-stationary process, indicating a lack of convergence. This result is robust to the different tests we use. However, when we assess the convergence in terms of the health-expenditure-to-GDP ratio, the convergence process is recorded for Austria only. The robustness check we performed using strict stationarity tests partially confirmed the mixed results we obtained. Therefore, our findings highlight the heterogeneity of the EU health care systems and the need for identification of common solutions to the EU health care systems' problems in order to enhance their convergence processes.
ISSN:1660-4601
1661-7827
1660-4601
DOI:10.3390/ijerph19041991