The impact of scientific research on health care: Evidence from the OECD countries

This paper investigates the impact of scientific research on health care productivity in a set of OECD countries, in the years from 1960 to 2008. To this end, we have matched information collected from the OECD Health Data 2010 with data gathered from the Scopus database on the papers published and their relative citations. Our empirical results suggest that medical research plays an important role in explaining health care productivity, although various countries are characterized by different velocities in assimilating scientific knowledge. Another important result that emerges from our work is that countries characterized by a faster absorption of academic science, such as the US, have on average a milder impact of scientific research on health productivity, compared with countries with slower absorption. As one would expect, we also find that countries absorbing more scientific research also bear higher health costs. Results from this study may support policy makers in designing incentive mechanisms to improve the impact of medical research on the health care system. (C) 2013 Published by Elsevier B.V.