We study the differential impacts of public and private sources of health spending on health outcomes using a triple difference approach. We find that private health spending has on average a higher health-promoting effect than public health spending. This result is robust with respect to the choice of outcome measure and covariates in the regression and driven primarily by the countries with ineffective governments. Once we restrict our sample to countries with effective governments, private health spending is found to be no better than public health spending in improving the health outcome.
Keywords: child mortality rate; government effectiveness; health spending; life expectancy at birth; triple difference.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.