Efficiency gains, not just higher health spending, are essential to reduce child mortality across major emerging economies.
Authors
Pinak Sarkar, Economics and Public Policy, Lal Bahadur Shastri Institute of Management, Delhi 11/07 Dwarka Sector 11, Near Metro Station, Delhi, New Delhi, 110075, India
Nutan Shashi Tigga, Assistant Professor, Jindal School of Banking and Finance, O.P. Jindal University, Sonipat, Haryana, India
Summary
In this study, we measure the efficiency and productivity of public health expenditures in improving child mortality outcomes in ten major emerging economies of the world. We use bootstrap data envelopment analysis (DEA) and the bootstrap Malmquist productivity index (MPI) to measure the progress of efficiency and productivity from 2010–2020. Furthermore, we test the statistical significance of the progress in efficiency and productivity using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. For robustness of the efficiency and productivity estimates, we report the confidence intervals and test the statistical significance of the scores across countries. The average bias-corrected overall technical efficiency score of 0.3381 suggests that if inefficiency could be eliminated, child survival could be improved by 66% in these countries. The MPI results suggest that over the study period, on average, productivity improved for all these nations except for Saudi Arabia and South Korea. At the policy level, the study suggested that an increase in health expenditure is not sufficient to improve health outcomes unless efficiency and productivity are achieved.
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