Is there any convergence in health expenditures across EU countries?

Claudiu Albulescu (1) , Cornel Oros (2) , Aviral Kumar Tiwari (3)

1 UPT - Universității Politehnica Timișoara [România] = Polytechnic University of Timişoara [Romania] = Université polytechnique de Timișoara [Roumanie]
2 CRIEF [Poitiers] - Centre de recherche sur l'intégration économique et financière
3 MRM - Montpellier Research in Management

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the degree of convergence in health expenditures for six EU countries over the time-span 1972 to 2013, namely Austria, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. To examine the convergence of health expenditures we rely on the health expenditures to GDP ratio group average. Different from previous essays, we draw a comparison between overall expenditure, governmental expenditure and private expenditure and we use recent developments in unit root testing of bounded series. Our findings show that the health expenditures spread from the group average follows in general a non-stationary process. We posit thus, there is no significant convergence in terms of health expenditures to GDP ratio, although there are few progresses in the case of the private sector for Finland and in the case of public sector, for Spain.

Mots clés: bounded unit root tests; convergence; EU countries; health expenditures; strict stationarity

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société

Claudiu Albulescu, Cornel Oros, Aviral Kumar Tiwari. Is there any convergence in health expenditures across EU countries?. Economics Bulletin, 2017, 37 (3), pp.2095-2101. ⟨hal-01981082⟩