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The study aims to determine whether there is a bidirectional causality relationship between health expenditures and per capita income in Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and Turkey (BRICS+T).

For that purpose, the 2000–2018 period data of the variables were tested with the Kónya (2006) panel causality test. Additionally, the causality relationships between public and private health expenditures and per capita income were also investigated in the study.

According to the analysis results, there is no statistically significant causality relationship from total health expenditures and public health expenditures to per capita income in the relevant countries. Besides, there is a unidirectional causality relationship from private health expenditures to per capita income only in Turkey. On the other hand, a unidirectional causality relationship from per capita income to total health expenditures in China, Russia, Turkey and South Africa and from per capita income to public health expenditures in India, Russia, Turkey and South Africa were determined. Consequently, a causality relationship from per capita income to private health expenditures was found out in Russia and Turkey.

The variables are tested for the first time for BRICS+T countries, vis-à-vis the period under consideration and the method used.

This study aims to investigate the impact of local windfall gains from the Spanish Christmas lottery on household consumption behavior.

The study applies differences-in-differences to assess permanent income hypothesis (PIH) validity, examining pre- and postlottery consumption effects. Additionally, it also uses an instrumental variable regression, using the lottery shock as an instrument for total expenditures, to estimate the Engel curves.

The paper finds a PIH violation; households in winning region notably increase consumption on durable and nondurable goods compared to nonwinning ones. Moreover, durable goods consumption is responsive to lottery winnings, while nondurable goods consumption are unit-elastic to expenditure shocks.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first paper analyzing the effects of winning regions of the Spanish Christmas lottery in all types of consumption goods, testing its consequences in the PIH and estimating its effects in the Engel curves.

This study aims to analyse the consumption inequality between farm and non-farm households in rural Vietnam, using the data from the 2016 Vietnam household living standards survey.

The present paper applies the “recentered influence functions (RIF)” in “Oaxaca-Blinder (OB)” type decomposition as proposed by Firpo et al. (2018) to allow for the flexible distribution of the outcome variables and the non-randomness of non-farm employment that violates the classical linearity assumption.

Non-farm households have significantly higher per capita consumption expenditure than farm households for the entire distribution. The gap in expenditure is large at low percentiles and narrowing with higher percentiles. At 10th percentile, the gap is estimated at 27.1%, but it is decreasing to 11.1% at 90th percentile. Most of the gaps are explained by the differences in the observed characteristics between farm and non-farm households such as ethnicity, education, income, internal transmittances and household composition. Non-farm households are endowed with more productive factors that result in higher per capita consumption expenditure.

Gaps in ethnicity and education are found to be key predictors of the inequality in consumption expenditures between farm and non-farm households, then, government policies that are aimed at increasing access to non-farm employment and education for ethnic minorities and for rural poor households are pathways to improve rural household welfare and hence reduce inequality.

The study aims to examine the impact of migration on household consumption expenditures in Bangladesh.

The paper uses coarsened exact matching methods to examine the causal impact between migration and household welfare using the dataset on Bangladesh Household Income and Expenditure Survey 2010 on 12,213 households.

The study reveals that migration has a positive impact on household welfare improvement through increases in their consumption expenditures. Households with migration status are found to spend more on food, non-food (housing, durable goods, fuel, cosmetics, cleaning, transport, clothing, taxes, insurance, recreation) items and medical. However, the authors do not find any evidence of impacts on education expenditures.

The availability of panel data and the use of other variables (e.g. household investment expenditures, household budget allocation for agricultural input expenses, etc.) would have been able to provide vivid results.

This paper adds to the Bangladeshi migration literature by offering a novel empirical assessment of the Bangladeshi migrants and its impact on household welfare by drawing upon a recently published, nationally representative sample of Bangladeshi households.

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.

In Covid-19 pandemic era when most households' members have lost their jobs and incomes, the government assistance and programs in ensuring household consumption smoothing is very significant. The main objectives of this study are to analyze the impact of government expenditure and free maternal healthcare (FMHC) policy on household consumption expenditure in Ghana in both long run and short run.

They used the ARDL to estimate the impact of government expenditure on household consumption and Segmented Linear Regression to examine impact of FMHC policy household consumption using longitudinal data from 1967 to 2018.

The results revealed that government expenditure had a negative and statistically significant effect on household consumption expenditure suggesting that government expenditure crowed-out private consumption in Ghana. Also, it was observed that before the implementation of the FMHC policy, there was an increase household consumption expenditure, but after the introduction of the FMHC policy, the study household consumption expenditure decreases significantly suggesting that FMHC policy has strong association with household consumption in Ghana.

Due to limited data availability, this study did not assess the impact of the FMHC policy at the household or district level. Also, Ghana has introduced a free senior high school education policy in 2017 so further research could analyze the implications of these policies for household consumption in Ghana at the micro-level using different estimation technique such as the difference in difference.

The study suggests the need to increase public spending on basic social amenities and also extend the free maternal healthcare policy to all pregnant women especially those in the rural areas of Ghana as these have a greater impact on household consumption in Ghana. The findings from this study have important implications for household savings and interest rate in Ghana. The findings from this study also have important implications for both fiscal policy and healthcare policy in Ghana and other developing countries.

To the best of my knowledge this is the first empirical study to examine the effect of government expenditure and free maternal healthcare policy on household consumption in Ghana.

This paper aims to evaluate the technical efficiency of the health-care systems in 21 selected middle-income countries during the period (2000–2017) and determine the source of inefficiency whether it is transient (short run) or persistent (long run).

The study uses the stochastic frontier analysis technique through employing the generalized true random effects model which overcomes the drawbacks of the previously introduced stochastic frontier models and allows for the separation between unobserved heterogeneity, persistent inefficiency and transient inefficiency.

Persistent efficiency is lower than the transient efficiency; hence, there are more efficiency gains that can be made by the selected countries by adopting long-term policies that aim at reforming the structure of the health-care system in the less efficient countries such as South Africa and Russia. The most efficient countries are Vietnam, Mexico and China which adopted a social health insurance that covers almost the whole population with the aim of increasing access to health-care services. Also, decentralization in health-care has assisted in adopting health-care policies that are suitable for both the rural and urban areas based on their specific conditions and health-care needs. A key success in the implementation of the adopted long-term policies by those countries is the continuous monitoring and evaluation of their outcomes and comparing them with the predefined targets and conducting any necessary modifications to ensure their movement in the right path to achieve their goals.

Although several studies have evaluated the technical efficiency both across and within countries using non-parametric (data envelopment analysis) and parametric (stochastic frontier analysis) approaches, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to evaluate the technical efficiency of selected middle-income countries during the period (2000–2017) using the generalized true random effects stochastic frontier analysis model.

Using cross-sectional household survey data, this paper aims to determine the impact of food price increases on poverty in Indonesia.

This paper uses the quadratic almost ideal demand system applied to the 2013 Indonesian household survey data. The impact of food price increase on household welfare is calculated using a welfare measure, compensating variation.

Three food groups with the most outstanding price impact on poverty, rice, vegetables and fish, were studied. The 20% increase in the price of each food group causes an increase in the headcount ratio by 1.360 points (rice), 0.737 points (vegetables) and 0.636 points (fish). Maintaining food price stability for these food groups is very important because the more the price increases, the more the impact on poverty. Food price policies in rural areas are also more critical than in urban areas because the impact of food price increases in rural areas is higher.

This paper does not consider the positive impact of rising food prices on food-producing households.

Implementing appropriate poverty alleviation policies through food policies for main food groups and social protection.

Promoting rural development policies and agricultural growth.

This paper contributes to the existing literature by providing empirical results regarding the impact of domestic food prices increase on poverty in Indonesia.

One of the main theories regarding the relationship between government expenditure and gross domestic product (GDP) is Wagner’s law. This law was developed in the late-19th century by Adolph Wagner (1835–1917), a prominent German economist, and depicts that an increase in government expenditure is a feature often associated with progressive states. This paper aims to examine the validity of Wagner’s law in Egypt for 1960–2018. The relationship between real government expenditure and real GDP is tested using three versions of Wagner’s law.

To test the validity of Wagner in Egypt, law time-series analysis is used. The methodology used in this paper is: unit-root tests for stationarity, Johansen cointegration approach, error-correction model and Granger causality.

The results provide strong evidence of long-term relationship between GDP and government expenditure. Moreover, the causal relationship is found to be bi-directional. Hence, this study provides support for Wagner’s law in the examined context.

It should be noted, however, that there are some limitations to this study. For instance, in this paper, the government’s size was measured through government consumption expenditure rather than government expenditure due to data availability, which does not fully capture the government size. Moreover, the data available was limited and does not fully cover the earliest stages of industrialization and urbanization for Egypt. Furthermore, although time-series analysis provides a more contextualized results and conclusions, the obtained conclusions suffer from their limited generalizability.

This paper aims to specifically make a contribution to the empirical literature for Wagner’s law, by testing the Egyptian data using time-series econometric techniques for the longest time period examined so far, which is 1960–2018.

This study investigates how the consumption of sugar products and non-alcoholic beverages has changed across birth cohorts. In addition, this study examines how the socio-economic gaps in the consumption of said products have evolved across birth cohorts.

The research data are drawn from the Finnish household expenditure surveys covering the period 1985–2016 (n = 44,286). An age-period-cohort methodology is utilised through the age-period-cohort-trended lag model. The model assumes that the linear long-term component of change is caused by generations replacing one-another, and that the age effect is similar across cohorts.

Sugar products and non-alcoholic beverages occupied a larger portion of more recent birth cohorts' food baskets. Cohort differences were larger in beverage consumption. Lower income was associated with a higher food expenditure share of sugar products in several cohorts. A higher education level was linked to a higher food expenditure share of sugar products in more cohorts than a lower education level. In cohorts born before the 1950s, non-alcoholic beverages occupied a larger portion of the food baskets of the high socio-economic status groups. This gap reversed over time, leading to larger food expenditure shares of non-alcoholic beverages in low socio-economic status groups.

This study assessed how the consumption of sugar products and non-alcoholic beverages has changed across birth cohorts. In addition, this study assessed how socio-economic differences in the consumption of said products have changed. The results highlight that sugar products and non-alcoholic beverages occupy larger portions of more recent birth cohorts’ food baskets. The results also highlight a reversal of socioeconomic differences in non-alcoholic beverage consumption.