Public health and national security proxies: Case of European countries

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred transformations aimed at ensuring the effectiveness of the public health system and highlighted the need for a deeper study of the causal relationships between the parameters of healthcare system effectiveness and the national security. The aim of this study is to identify causal and temporal patterns in the impact of various types of healthcare expenditures on the components of national security. The study was conducted on a sample of 34 European countries for 2000-2021. In order to achieve the research objectives, integral indicators of economic, social, and environmental security were developed based on a complex combination of principal component analysis, Fishburn formula and additive convolution. Panel data regression modelling was employed to identify causal relationships between health care expenditures and those integral indicators. Finally, distributional-lag modelling (testing for the presence of a lag of up to 3 years) identified temporal patterns of the relationship between the indicators. Causal and temporal patterns of the relationship between health care expenditures and components of national security of the state were determined according to the modelling results.