Analysing the impact of fiscal decentralization on health outcomes: empirical evidence from Spain

The aim of this article is to explore the impact of decentralization on health care outcomes in Spain. We develop a model and use it to investigate empirically the hypothesis that shifts towards greater decentralization would be accompanied by improvements in population health in Spain between 1992 and 2003 by using infant mortality and life expectancy as dependent variables. The empirical analysis suggests that income, decentralization and health care resources in Spain did have an important influence on infant mortality and life expectancy.