Pharmaceutical Expenditure as a Determinant of Health Outcomes in EU Countries

Abstract

This paper studies the effects that pharmaceutical expenditure and other medical non-durables has on health outcomes, such as mortality and life expectancy. Some recent research is focused on the study of public expenditure in health and the correlation with positive health indicators, and also on the relative effectiveness of various medical health care inputs. As a specific case of this research, we center our interest on the pharmaceutical expenditure among various European countries in order to compare if expenditures are effective in health results, or on the contrary, countries with higher levels of pharmacy consumption do not have better health indicators. We carried out a regression analysis with panel data. The results imply that there is a positive effect between pharmaceutical expenditure and health outcomes.