Health care expenditures in Asia countries: Panel data analysis

Most studies on the link between health care expenditure (HCE) and GDP have been analyzed using data intensively from OECD countries, but little is known for other regions. The contribution of this paper is to present new results of several panel unit root and cointegration tests from 11 Asian countries using balanced panel data for the period of 1975 -2006. The findings suggest the presence of unit-roots and cointegration in HCE and GDP in Asian data for both cases of with and without time trend in the regressions. This study also finds that the income elasticity varies largely from country to country either the short-run or the long-run. Moreover, the Granger causality tests suggest that only uni-directional causality (GDP cause HCE) does exist.