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This study aims to investigate the consequence of the quality of governance (QoG) in moderating the effect of healthcare spending on human development.

The authors employ a two-step Windmeijer finite sample-corrected system-generalized method of moments (sys-GMM) estimation technique on a panel dataset of 161 countries from 2005 to 2019. The authors use healthcare expenditure as the main explanatory variable and the Human Development Index (HDI) as the dependent variable and also consider voice and accountability (VnA), political stability and absence of terrorism (PSnAT), governance effectiveness (GoE), regulatory quality (ReQ), rules of law (RLaw) and control of corruption (CoC) dimensions of governance indicators as proxies of good governance. The authors develop a new measure of good governance from these six dimensions of governance using principal component analysis (PCA).

The authors empirically revealed that allocating more healthcare support alone is insufficient to improve human development. Individually, PSnAT has the highest net positive effect on health expenditure that helps to increase human welfare. Further, the corresponding interaction effect between expenditure and the Good Governance Index (GGI) is negative but insignificant for low-income countries (LICs); negative and statistically significant for sub-Saharan African (SSA) economies and positive but insignificant for South Asian nations.

This study is an in-depth analysis of how governance impacts the effectiveness of healthcare expenditure to ensure higher human development, particularly in a large panel of 161 countries. The authors have developed a new index of good governance and later extended the analysis by separating countries based on the income level and geographical location, which are utterly absent in existing literature.

The United States devotes a larger share of its GDP to health care and spends more on health care per capita than any other country. The sheer size of the total spending on health care, at approximately $3.5 trillion in 2017, puts significant pressure on all payers and crowds out other forms of public and private spending.

In this brief commentary the authors suggest that, as part of the effort to deal with this pressure, the United States should look at borrowing a cost containment strategy from other countries: the use of hard caps on spending growth. The authors draw on our their experience of working with decision-makers over the last 20 years on the topic of priority setting to put forward some ideas on whether there is potential for application of trade-offs in the United States.

As hard caps force choices to be made, a necessary condition for successful implementation of this policy is the presence of an effective priority-setting framework to ensure that the right choices are made in operationalizing spending limitations. Work on this topic elsewhere can provide some insight into the use of a criteria-based framework for priority setting that purports transparency in decision-making to achieve value-based decisions.

Other countries still have much work to do, but there is a substantial track record of using formal priority-setting approaches that could potentially inform practice in the United States. We suggest that there are key segments of the US healthcare system where the adoption of formal priority-setting frameworks to guide trade-off decisions is feasible. Piloting such activity in these contexts is the next natural step in this line of inquiry.

In large parts of the world, income inequality has been rising in recent decades. Other regions have experienced declining trends in income inequality. This raises the question of which mechanisms underlie contrasting observed trends in income inequality around the globe. To address this research question in an empirical analysis at the aggregate level, we examine a global sample of 73 countries between 1981 and 2010, studying a broad set of drivers to investigate their interaction and influence on income inequality. Within this broad approach, we are interested in the heterogeneity of income inequality determinants across world regions and along the income distribution. Our findings indicate the existence of a small set of systematic drivers across the global sample of countries. Declining labour income shares and increasing imports from high-income countries significantly contribute to increasing income inequality, while taxation and imports from low-income countries exert countervailing effects. Our study reveals the region-specific impacts of technological change, financial globalisation, domestic financial deepening and public social spending. Most importantly, we do not find systematic evidence of education’s equalising effect across high- and low-income countries. Our results are largely robust to changing the underlying sources of income Ginis, but looking at different segments of income distribution reveals heterogeneous effects.

This paper aims to evaluate the progressivity of health-care financing in Egypt by assessing all five financing sources individually and then combining them to analyze the equity of the whole financing system.

Lorenz dominance analysis and Kakwani progressivity index were applied on data from 2010/2011 Household Income, Expenditure, and Consumption Survey and the National Health Accounts 2011 using Stata to evaluate the progressivity of each source of health-care finance and the financing system overall.

The data show that Egypt’s health-care system, which is largely financed by out-of-pocket (OOP) payments, is slightly regressive, with an overall Kakwani index of −0.079. The overall regressive effect was the result of three regressive sources (OOP payments, an earmarked cigarette tax and direct taxes), one proportional finance source (social health insurance) and two slightly progressive sources (indirect taxes and private health insurance). This shows that the burden of financing health care falls more on the poor. These results signal the need for reform of health-care financing in Egypt to reduce dependence on OOP payments to achieve more equitable financing.

The paper seeks to augment the literature on health-care financing in Egypt by calculating specific progressivity estimates for all five sources of financing the Egyptian health-care system and analyzing the overall equity of this financing system. It will, therefore, provide a benchmark for monitoring the equity of finance in the Egyptian health-care system in future studies and allow one to assess the impact of implemented financing reforms in the future on the level of progressivity of health system financing.

This study aims at evaluating the technical efficiency (TE) of healthcare systems in the Arab region and exploring the key factors that affect the efficiency performance.

The study applies a two-stage Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach to a sample of 20 Arab countries. In the first stage, a DEA model is used to calculate the TE scores of the examined healthcare systems in 2019 and 2010, following both the output and input orientations of efficiency. In the second stage, a censored Tobit model is estimated to investigate the determinants of healthcare efficiency.

DEA results of 2019 indicate that achievable efficiency gains of the Arab countries range from 0.4% to 16% under the output and input orientations, respectively. Six countries are efficient under both orientations. Although the average efficiency scores of the Arab countries have deteriorated between 2010 and 2019, Djibouti and Sudan had the greatest efficiency improvements between the two years. Bahrain, Mauritania, Morocco and Qatar proved to be efficient in 2010 and 2019 under the two orientations of efficiency and according to the two DEA specifications followed. The Tobit model reveals that corruption and government health expenditure tend to have an adverse impact on healthcare efficiency.

The author evaluates healthcare efficiency and healthcare's efficiency determinants in the Arab countries. Regardless Arab countries' diversity, these countries are facing common health challenges, including diminishing role of governments in healthcare financing; increased out-of-pocket healthcare spending; poor healthcare outputs and prevalence of health inequities resulting from weak governance institutions. Comparing the efficiency of healthcare systems between 2010 and 2019 gives insights on the potential impact of the Arab spring uprisings on healthcare efficiency. Moreover, examining the determinants of healthcare efficiency allows for better understanding of how to improve the efficiency of healthcare systems in the region.

Climate change affects the geographic and seasonal range of malaria incidence, especially, in poor tropical countries. This paper aims to attempt to conceptualize the potential economic repercussions of such effects with its focus on Ethiopia.

The paper is conceptual and descriptive in its design. It first reviews existing literature and evidence on the economic burdens of malaria, and the impacts of climate change on malaria disease. It then draws the economic implications of the expected malaria risk under the future climate. This is accompanied by a discussion on a set of methods that can be used to quantify the economic effects of malaria with or without climate change.

A review of available evidence shows that climate change is likely to increase the geographic and seasonal range of malaria incidence in Ethiopia. The economic consequences of even a marginal increase in malaria risk will be substantial as one considers the projected impacts of climate change through other channels, the current population exposed to malaria risk and the country’s health system, economic structure and level of investment. The potential effects have the potency to require more household and public spending for health, to perpetuate poverty and inequality and to strain agricultural and regional development.

This paper sheds light on the economic implications of climate change impacts on malaria, particularly, in Agrarian countries laying in the tropics. It illustrates how such impacts will interact with other impact channels of climate change, and thus evolve to influence the macro-economy. The paper also proposes a set of methods that can be used to quantify the potential economic effects of malaria. The paper seeks to stimulate future research on this important topic which rather has been neglected.

The study examines the impact of socio-economic governance on economic growth in Nigeria. It measures socio-economic governance from the perspective of fiscal policy, using indicators such as investment in education, research and development (R&D) and health.

This study employs the Autoregressive Distributive Lag (ARDL) Bound Testing method to achieve its objective.

The study finds that socio-economic policies aimed at increasing investment in education are crucial for Nigeria’s long-term economic growth. Additionally, investment in R&D positively impacts economic growth. However, the study reveals that investment in health negatively affects economic growth in Nigeria in the long run. This suggests that if a country overinvests in health, it may divert resources from other vital sectors such as education, infrastructure and R&D, which can hinder overall economic growth. The short-run parameter is, however, not statistically significant in this study.

The study’s originality lies in its exploration of the relationship between socio-economic governance and economic growth in Nigeria, specifically from a fiscal policy perspective. It highlights the importance of investing in education and R&D for long-term economic growth. Additionally, the finding that overinvestment in health may have a negative impact on long-term economic growth provides valuable insight for policymakers in Nigeria and other developing countries. Overall, this study’s findings can be beneficial for policymakers and researchers interested in the intersection between socio-economic governance and economic growth in developing countries.