what drives health care expenditure baumol s model of unbalanced growth revisited the share of health care expenditure in gdp rises rapidly in virtually all oecd countries causing increasing concern among politicians and the general public yet economists have to date failed to reach an agreement on what the main determinants of this development are this paper revisits baumol s baumol w j 1967 macroeconomics of unbalanced growth the anatomy of urban crisis american economic review 57 3 415 426 model of unbalanced growth showing that the latter offers a ready explanation for the observed inexorable rise in health care expenditure the main implication of baumol s model in this context is that health care expenditure is driven by wage increases in excess of productivity growth this hypothesis is tested empirically using data from a panel of 19 oecd countries our tests yield robust evidence in favor of baumol s theory

examining structural breaks and growth rates in international health expenditures over the last decade there has been a growing interest in examining health expenditures in this paper we study the behaviour of health expenditures in the g3 countries usa the uk and japan and three european countries the uk switzerland and spain over the period 1960 2000 from a different perspective in that we examine 1 whether there is a common structural break in health expenditures across the g3 and european countries 2 whether structural breaks have slowed down health expenditure growth rates in these countries or vice versa our main findings are that 1 health expenditures share a common break in both bivariate and trivariate cases and structural breaks and break intervals suggest that either one or a combination of events second oil price shock the 1987 stock market crash and or recessions have contributed to the commonality of break in health expenditures in the g3 while the oil price shocks have been instrumental in the commonality of breaks for the european countries 2 except for the uk structural breaks have slowed down growth rates in health expenditures for the usa japan switzerland and spain

the welfare effects of the reagan deficits a portfolio choice approach i introduction the election of ronald reagan as u s president in 1980 prompted a series of changes in tax policy that combined with an increase in spending led to a large increase in the ratio of debt to gross domestic product gdp work by yotsuzuka 1987 kimball and mankiw 1989 and woodford 1990 demonstrates that increases in public debt can be welfare improving ameliorating asset market imperfections or incompleteness i divide the u s population into three asset holding classes and construct a general equilibrium asset portfolio model to analyze the differential welfare implications of the succession of tax cuts and increases in the united states between 1982 and 1997 i conclude that in contrast to a counterfactual policy of smoothing tax rates across the whole period the policy of first lowering and then raising taxes benefited the large population that initially only invested in low risk assets chiefly in the middle of the income distribution at the expense of those who either owned equities mostly higher income or held no financial assets at all mostly lower income domar and musgrave 1944 were the first to study the effects of taxation on portfolio choice their work focused on the effects of loss offsets on risk taking mossin 1968 and stiglitz 1969 1972 extended this work by adding agents with general expected utility functions ben gad 2000 extended their partial equilibrium analysis to a two period general equilibrium model with a two state stochastic endowment economy and demonstrated that when capital markets are imperfect deficit finance has differential effects on households in section ii i construct a two period general equilibrium extension of the mossin stiglitz portfolio choice model with holdings of each asset constrained to be nonnegative in section iii i divide the households in the 1983 89 panel of the survey of consumer finances scf into three groups those who held no financial assets other than cash in 1982 those who only held low risk financial assets in 1982 checking accounts savings accounts money market accounts bonds and finally those whose asset portfolios included higher risk equities i calculate income and social insurance tax rates for each household and then average the results by asset holding class for each year between 1981 and 1997 the scf reveals large differences in portfolio holdings among households in the united states in my model the differential portfolio behavior is endogenous a by product of both the different sizes of idiosyncratic shocks to labor income experienced by members of the different groups and the generalized stone geary utility function used to model individual preferences the nonconstant heterogeneous rate of relative risk aversion implied by agent s uniform preferences permits this portfolio model to accommodate both the very high equity premiums observed in the data and the fact that most u s households chose not to invest in the stock market using a previous study of earnings variance based on panel study of income dynamics psid data the variances of uninsured idiosyncratic risk for the representative members of each group are imputed to ensure consistency between observed portfolio behavior and asset returns the baseline model is solved for the preference parameters and expected earnings using the scf and u s macroeconomic data in section iv i describe the changes in u s fiscal policy during the reagan bush and clinton administrations in section v i replace the 1982 97 average tax rates used to parameterize the model with a separate average tax rate for each of the two periods of the model during the first period most tax rates are set to the lower values of the period between 1982 89 the policy is self financing taxes in the second period rise to keep the debt gdp ratio at the end of the second period no higher than at the beginning of the first

revisiting the role of education for agricultural productivity while the majority of micro studies finds that rural education increases agricultural productivity various recent cross country regressions analysing the determinants of agricultural productivity were only able to detect insignificant or even surprising negative effects of schooling in this paper we argue and show that this failure to find a positive impact of education in the international context is rather a data problem related to the use of enrolment and literacy indicators using a panel of 95 developing and middle income countries from 1961 to 2002 together with the newest version of the barro lee educational attainment dataset we show that education indeed has a highly significant positive effect on agricultural productivity which is robust to changes in the control variables and in the econometric methods applied distinguishing between different levels of education further reveals that only primary and secondary schooling have significant positive impacts while tertiary education remains insignificant finally the effect of education is estimated separately for countries with different income levels results indicate that the coefficient of the education variable remains insignificant for countries from the poorest three income quintiles while it is positive and highly significant for the richest two quintiles this finding can be interpreted as support for the prominent argument claiming that education leads to higher agricultural productivity only in the presence of rapid technical change where education will help farmers to adjust more readily to the new opportunities

is health care a necessity or a luxury pooled estimates of income elasticity from us state level data this paper provides new evidence on the income elasticity of health care by combining stationarity and cointegration tests of health care expenditure and incomes with estimates of the cointegrating relationship between them a recently updated dataset of health care expenditures and disposable personal income for the us states for the years 1966 1998 is used the principal findings are that health care expenditures and incomes at the state level are non stationary and cointegrated dynamic ols cointegrating regressions of the pooled state time series estimate the income elasticity of health care at 0 817 to 0 844 well below unity confirming that health care expenditure even at the aggregate level is a necessity good

do per capita health care expenditures converge among oecd countries evidence from unit root tests with level and trend shifts this study examines the stochastic conditional convergence of per capita health care expenditures pchce among 19 oecd countries over the period 1972 2008 specifically newly developed lm and rals lm unit root tests with allowance for two endogenously determined structural breaks are employed the results indicate support for pchce convergence among most oecd countries the results are stronger in more general tests that control for two breaks and nonnormal errors panel unit root tests provide additional support for the stochastic convergence of pchce

agricultural trade and poverty in chile a spatial analysis of product tradability many questions have arisen about the relationship between international agricultural trade and poverty in developing countries this article explores these questions by analyzing local agricultural tradability indices which measure the degree to which commodities produced in a particular region are traded internationally data are examined for chile a middle income country with a history of international agricultural trade over the last decades empirical results indicate that a higher agricultural tradability index is associated with lower poverty rates across chilean comunas

farm productivity and rural poverty in india armed with new data we return to an old question from the pages of this journal to what extent do india s rural poor share in agricultural growth combining data from 24 household sample surveys spanning 35 years with other sources we estimate a model of the joint determination of consumption poverty measures agricultural wages and food prices we find that higher farm productivity brought both absolute and relative gains to poor rural households a large share of the gains was via wages and prices though these effects took time the benefits to the poor were not confined to those near the poverty line

getting agriculture moving do markets provide the right signals abstract political discrimination has often pushed the domestic value of agriculture in developing countries below its value in markets at the border this paper seeks to explain the reasons why border prices themselves undervalue the linkages that agriculture has to economic growth in the early stages of development if agriculture is critically important to stimulating and sustaining rapid economic growth those countries that fail to correct this discrimination exact a heavy toll in economic performance furthermore the poorest countries will suffer the most agricultural development and development of the non agricultural economy are closely linked the traditional market mediated linkages form the core of economic analysis of the role of agriculture in economic development providing labour for an industrial work force food for an expanding population with higher incomes savings for industrial investments markets for industrial output export earnings to pay for imported capital goods and raw materials for agro processing industries a second category of linkages is not well mediated by market forces even when markets are working well the impact of agricultural growth on the rest of the economy through non market linkages can be traced using a simple growth accounting framework that examines contributions to the labour force capital investment and the productivity with which these two physical factors are utilised several linkages stand out as likely to be important and potentially measurable because they draw on the efficiency of decision making in rural households the low opportunity cost of their labour resources the opportunity for farm investment without financial intermediaries the potential to earn high rates of return on public investments that correct for urban bias the contribution of food price stability to increased efficiency in investment decisions and the impact of growth in food production on widespread improvement in nutrient intake and labour productivity each of these factors alone as public investment and favourable policy stimulate growth in the agricultural sector should cause an increase in the efficiency of resource allocation and thus higher total factor productivity several of these mechanisms will also serve to speed factor accumulation by increasing the savings rate or improving factor mobility

industrialisation catching up and economic growth a comparative study across the world s capitalist economies various hypotheses are examined seeking to explain inter country convergence at the upper end but divergence at the lower end of the world income rankings a model of disequilibrium growth with sector specific technological progress and spillover is developed and then estimated on two samples of capitalist economies 1960 85 it is found that the degree of disequilibrium between agriculture and industry is greatest in the least developed economies but their rate of labor transfer has been slow technological spillover has stimulated productivity growth in less developed agricultural sectors but not in the industrial sectors of the least developed economies copyright 1991 by royal economic society

demographic political institutional and financial determinants of regional social expenditure the case of spain abstractdemographic political institutional and financial determinants of regional social expenditure the case of spain regional studies this paper contributes to the literature on the determinants of regional social spending using a dataset of the 17 regional governments in spain with both a fixed effects static and a dynamic model results suggest that demography inputs institutional design and resources are critical in determining the size of regional social budgets empirical evidence was found about the existence of economies of scale but social services do not seem to follow a luxury goods pattern left wing governments seem to spend more while federal regulations work as constraints of regional autonomy finally strong evidence that the foral system of regional financing is creating horizontal inequalities in the access to essential public services was found while the common regime seems to be working well enough

the impact of research led agricultural productivity growth on poverty reduction in africa asia and latin america abstract twenty percent of the world s population or 1 2 billion live on less than 1 per day 70 of these are rural and 90 are in asia and sub saharan africa research led technological change in agriculture generates sufficient productivity growth to give high rates of return in africa and asia and has a substantial impact on poverty currently reducing this number by 27 million per annum whereas productivity growth in industry and services has no impact the per capita cost of poverty reduction by means of agricultural research expenditures in africa is 144 and in asia 180 or 50 cents per day but this is covered by output growth by contrast the per capita cost for the richer countries of latin america is over 11 000

on stationarity and cointegration of international health expenditure and gdp this paper examines stationarity and cointegration of health expenditure and gdp for a sample of 21 oecd countries using data for the period 1960 1997 by applying a test battery that allows robust inference to be made on the stationarity and cointegration issue trend stationarity and no cointegration are tested using new country by country and panel tests not previously applied in this setting new results for country by country and panel tests of non stationarity and cointegration are presented our unit root and trend stationarity results indicate that both health expenditure and gdp are non stationary the no cointegration and cointegration results indicate that health expenditure and gdp are cointegrated

the growth of public health expenditures in oecd countries do government ideology and electoral motives matter this paper empirically evaluates whether government ideology and electoral motives influenced the growth of public health expenditures in 18 oecd countries over the 1971 2004 period the results suggest that incumbents behaved opportunistically and increased the growth of public health expenditures in election years government ideology did not have an influence these findings indicate 1 the importance of public health in policy debates before elections and 2 the political pressure towards re organizing public health policy platforms especially in times of demographic change

convergence in per capita health expenditures and health outcomes in the oecd countries our analysis of 19 organization for economic co operation and development oecd countries over the period 1972 to 2006 provides evidence of convergence in per capita health care expenditures for 17 countries while the us and to a lesser degree norway follow a different path a simple decomposition of per capita health expenditures reveals that the divergence of the us comes from the divergence of the ratio of health care expenditures to gross domestic product gdp component while norway s divergence is mainly caused by the labour productivity component interestingly our results suggest that convergence in per capita health expenditures among the 17 oecd countries does not lead to convergence in health outcomes finally we extend our analysis to examine convergence in various determinants of health expenditures

does agriculture contribute to economic growth some empirical evidence this paper augments the solow swan model of economic growth to include the share of the labour force working outside the agricultural sector as a labour augmenting variable in the aggregate production function the cross country empirical results suggest that transferring labour from the agricultural sector to other sectors of the economy is associated with economic growth this result is robust to using instrumental variables to control for the potential endogeneity of the relative size of the agricultural labour force

health care expenditures and gdp panel data unit root test results abstract this short paper presents unit root test results for time series on per capita national health care expenditures and gross domestic product in the oecd unlike the country by country test used by hansen p king a 1996 the determinants of health care expenditure a cointegration approach j health econ 15 127 137 the test we employ exploits the panel nature of the oecd data using this approach we are able to reject the null hypothesis that these series contain unit roots no single test is likely to be definitive in this rapidly evolving area of econometric research however our results help to mitigate concern that panel data analyses of national health care expenditures are misspecified

does morbidity matter perceived health status in explaining the share of healthcare expenditures we argue that the demand for healthcare services can be better explained by individual need based variables rather than by macro variables such as the gross domestic product gdp per capita and the share of public healthcare expenditures this study introduces a self rated health variable called morbidity that describes individual needs for health care healthy individuals need less health care than sick ones and that is measured through personal interviews conducted by the organization for economic co operation and development oecd in addition stationary properties of the series are considered in order to understand the effect of shocks to expenditure behaviour on health care stationary test results show that we should not only use differenced values for the model variables but also incorporate time specific effects into the model using the appropriate specification and accounting for the time effect we find evidence supporting the hypothesis that the share of healthcare expenditure in gdp ris

the granger causality between health care expenditure and output a panel data approach this study investigates the granger causality relationship between real per capita gdp and real per capita health care expenditure by employing a large macro panel data set with a var representatio

health care expenditure and gdp are they broken stationary in this paper we analyse the stationarity of the real per capita health care expenditure hce and real per capita gdp for a sample of oecd countries allowing for the presence of multiple structural breaks one novelty of the paper is that it permits the presence of structural breaks that affect both the level and the slope of the time series after the cross section dependence is accounted for we have found that these variables can be characterised as stationary processes evolving around a broken trend

demand for medical care consumption and cointegration abstract this paper considers a generalized version of grossman s health capital model and derives a cointegration restriction the restriction is tested using aggregate us data and the results are consistent with the prediction of the model

price and quantity in international comparisons of health care expenditure an important omission from earlier cross national comparisons of health care expenditure has been the failure to distinguish between price and quantity using recent data on purchasing power parities the purpose of this article is to report some preliminary results regarding health care expenditure and quantity across 22 oecd countries the article concludes that contrary to what has been suggested in some recent articles the relative price of health care is not correlated to the aggregate per capita income the fraction of the national income that is devoted to health care provision increases with the per capita income regardless of whether health care is measured in terms of expenditure or quantity the relative price of health care has a rationing effect on the quantity of health care that is offered with a price alasticity close to minus one the latter finding means that the health care expenditure is not greater in countries with higherprices furthermore the differences in health care expendit

a nonlinear approach to testing the unit root null hypothesis an application to international health expenditures in this article we examine the unit root null hypothesis for per capita total health expenditures hes per capita private hes and per capita public hes for 29 organization for economic co operation and development oecd countries the novelty of our work is that we use a new nonlinear unit root test that allows for one structural break in the data series we find that for around 45 of the countries we are able to reject the unit root hypothesis for each of the three he series moreover using monte carlo simulations we show that our proposed unit root model has better size and power properties than the widely used augmented dickey fuller adf and lagrange multiplier lm type tests

unit root and cointegration tests timeseries versus panel estimates for international health expenditure models classical regression estimates of the determinants of the oecd health expenditures are useful for policy formulation and evaluation however if the underlying timeseries data are not collectively stationary in levels the estimated parameters are faulty and can misguide health policy until very recently the crucial stationarity tests were ignored in a large number of studies on international comparisons stationarity adf phillips perron ips heterogeneous panel and cointegration engle granger bivariate johansen s multivariate tests are conducted here using 1960 1997 health expenditures data 1998 cd rom of 19 oecd countries it is found that extending the time series data length affects the order of integration and number of cointegrating vectors however it is arguable whether the order of integration decreases or increases as more observations are added for testing the failure of the johansen and engle granger cointegration tests for most of the oecd countries cautions policy makers against

aggregate health care expenditures and national income is health care a luxury good it is well known that a strong relationship exists between national expenditures on health care and national income this has been used to suggest that health care is a luxury good and that factors such as the type of health care delivery system in a country are of little importance in determining expenditure levels this paper argues that these implications rely upon the application of microeconomic analysis to macroeconomic data and that this is not appropriate as well as raising questions about the inferences drawn from previous studies new empirical evidence is presented which casts some doubts on previous findings international comparisons are based on purchasing power parity rather than exchange rate conversions underlining the importance of prices as well as quantities in the relationship and leading to the conclusion that the aggregate data show health care to be if anything a necessity rather than a luxury good

review of the literature on the determinants of healthcare expenditure this study reviews the literature on determinants of healthcare expenditure for the period 1998 to 2007 the methodology combines searches in the mesh database of pubmed with the search in the principal journals of health economics 20 primary studies were found that met the criteria for inclusion no single pattern of results is clearly identified among the 20 articles four consider income to be the principal determinant of healthcare expenditure two of them jointly with population ageing six highlight population ageing as against six others that emphasize the proximity to death the remaining six do not focus on a specific variable or focus on another variable e g technological progress or territorial decentralization 11 of the 20 articles calculate the income elasticity of demand only two of them obtaining a value greater than 1 thus cataloguing healthcare expenditure as a luxury good there is therefore no unanimity in the variables and econometric regressions of healthcare expenditure in

does environmental quality influence health expenditures empirical evidence from a panel of selected oecd countries in this paper we examine the role of environmental quality in determining per capita health expenditures we take a panel cointegration approach in order to explore the possibility of estimating both short run and long run impacts of environmental quality our empirical analysis is based on eight oecd countries namely austria denmark iceland ireland norway spain switzerland and the uk for the period 1980 1999 we find that per capita health expenditure per capita income carbon monoxide emissions sulphur oxide emissions and nitrogen oxide emissions are panel cointegrated while short run elasticities reveal that income and carbon monoxide emissions exert a statistically significant positive effect on health expenditures in the long run in addition to income and carbon monoxide we find that sulphur oxide emissions have a statistically significant positive impact on health expenditures

is social protection a necessity or a luxury good new multivariate cointegration panel data results the aim of this paper is to test the claim that social protection is a luxury good therefore gdp elasticity of selected social protection expenditure is estimated using a new econometric approach developed first by kao and chiang advances in econometrics 15 179 222 2000 time series properties of selected social expenditure in 18 oecd countries from 1981 to 1998 are examined using panel data cointegration tests and ols fmols and dols estimators results were found which differ from previous analyses reporting substantially higher income elasticities with the fmols selected social expenditure has income elasticities smaller than one but greater than one with the dols it is noteworthy that whether selected social expenditure is stationary or nonstationary may have critical implications for researchers and policy makers desiring to model and explain the impact of this expenditure on a country economic system

cointegration and unit roots this paper provides an updated survey of a burgeoning literature on testing estimation and model specification in the presence of integrated variables integrated variables are a specific class of non stationary variables which seem to characterise faithfully the properties of many macroeconomic time series the analysis of cointegration develops out of the existence of unit roots and offers a generic route to test the validity of the equilibrium predictions of economic theories special emphasis is put on the empirical researcher s point of view

induced innovation and energy prices this paper uses u s patent data from 1970 to 1994 to study the impact of energy prices on energy efficient innovations theories of technological change have focused both on demand side factors which spur innovative activity by increasing the value of new innovations and supply side factors such as scientific advancements that make new innovations possible data on demand side factors are easily obtained but data on supply side factors that influence innovation are not readily available this paper uses patent citations as a measure of the usefulness of the existing base of scientific knowledge citations to previous patents are used to construct productivity estimates which measure the usefulness of the existing stock of knowledge to inventors in a given energy field for any given year these estimates are then combined with data on demand side factors to estimate a model of induced innovation in energy technologies the results indicate that both energy prices and the supply of knowledge have strongly significant positive effects on innovation the paper concludes with a discussion of the implication of this work for environmental policy

the incidence of deficit finance with imperfect capital markets the purpose of this paper is to examine the possible differential welfare implications of deficit finance using a portfolio allocation model to analyze the incidence of changing the time path of taxation in an economy with heterogeneous agents i develop a two period general equilibrium extension of work done previously to analyze the effects of taxation on risk taking at the individual level constraints on short sales of assets are introduced and fiscal policy changing the timing of taxation will indirectly determine which of these constraints bind as well as alter relative tax burdens changes in the timing of a flat rate tax will also alter equilibrium asset returns and because preferences are such that agents differ in their tolerance of risk a pareto frontier can be derived over a range of different levels of deficit finance

on the effect of income and relative price on demand for health care ec evidence this paper demonstrates that the relative price of health care could be used to explain the conflicting results of the empirical studies which attempt to measure the income elasticity of demand our empirical results based on a conventional model and cross national data set for the ec show that whereas health care may be labelled as a luxury good the large income effect can be interpreted as merely offsetting the price effect

new panel results on cointegration of international health expenditure and gdp this article tests for existence of cointegration between health expenditure and gdp using data from 25 oecd countries for the period 19607ndash 1997 the empirical modelling is based on a heterogeneous bivariate vector error correction panel model that allows for trending data as well as intercepts and trends in the cointegrating relations univariate country by country and panel unit root tests generally fail to reject the null of a unit root in the health expenditure and gdp variables country by country results based on the johansen multivariate likelihood based inference indicate somewhat mixed results on country specific cointegration with a rank of one found for 12 countries and a rank of zero for the remaining 13 countries application of a new panel test for cointegration rank with higher power than the individual tests indicates that health expenditure and gdp are cointegrated around linear trends

evidence on the determinants of canadian provincial government health expenditures 1965 1991 abstract real per capita provincial government expenditures on health care over the period 1965 1991 are examined using pooled time series cross section regression analysis key determinants of real per capita provincial government expenditures on health care over the period 1965 1991 are real provincial per capita income the proportion of the provincial population over age 65 and real provincial per capita federal transfer revenues established program financing had a negative and significant impact on real per capita provincial government health expenditures in newfoundland and quebec an income elasticity of 0 77 implies that health care is not a luxury good

conversion factor instability in international comparisons of health care expenditure parkin mcguire and yule 1987 hereafter pmy report that a regression of per capita health care expenditure on per capita income using different conversion factors exchange rates gdp ppps health ppps gave rise to different results in this note we apply updated data to the same empirical relationship in contrast to pmy we find no noticeable conversion factor instability in that relationship either with respect to the health care income elasticity or with the magnitude of multiple correlation coefficient

granger causality between total expenditure on health and gdp in oecd evidence from the toda yamamoto approach abstract in this paper a modified version of the granger causality test proposed by toda and yamamoto is used to investigate causality between gdp and healthcare expenditure in oecd countries the findings indicate that bidirectional granger causality is predominant

on the determination of the us aggregate health care expenditure per capita real health care expenditure is examined against three major groups of explanatory variables economic demographic and health stock and it is found that the three groups of variables have an impact on real health care spending other subcategories such as real private and government health care pharmaceutical dental home nursing ambulatory personal medical consumption and in patient expenditures have also been examined and have been found to be affected by the explanatory variables for several subcomponents there is evidence of supplier inducement of the demographic group of variables the ageing population had an impact only on the per capita real overall and private health care outlay and pharmaceutical spending also cointegrating relationships were found and consistent estimators of the elasticities found

ricardian equivalence in the presence of capital market imperfections abstract it is a common claim that ricardian equivalence fails if capital markets are imperfect the validity of this claim is examined for the case of informationally imperfect capital markets we present three alternative models of adverse selection and analyze the effects of debt finance in these models it is shown that a debt financed tax cut can lead to pareto improvement in some cases in the theoretically most preferable model however ricardian equivalence survives in spite of genuine imperfections in the capital market the results point to the importance of specifying the exact nature of imperfection

is health care really a luxury a demand and supply approach many studies have found strong and positive relationship between per capita income and health care expenditure these studies usually adopt the assumptions that 1 the relationships among the variables are constant and or 2 the supply side market for health care could be treated by using standard demand functions models to take into account of the supply side of health care we use the demand and supply approach with the cointegration model to re examine this issue by using taiwan health care expenditure data our results show that the real income elasticity is smaller than unity and the health care expenditures are primarily for curing rather than caring

the determinants and effects of health expenditure in developed countries previous studies of international differences in health spending have been restricted to the use of relatively small samples of cross sectional data our objective here is to re examine the results of previous work using a sample of 560 pooled time series and cross section observations results confirm the importance of gdp as a determinant of health spending with an estimated income elasticity at or around unity but also suggest that oecd countries should not be regarded as a single homogeneous group the importance of some non income variables is also confirmed although the direct effect of these factors appears to be small

cointegration and dynamic time series models abstract this paper provides a survey of some of the recent developments in the field of econometric modelling with cointegrated time series in particular we describe the testing and estimation procedures which have become increasingly popular in the recent applied literature in addition to the two stage procedure proposed by engle and granger we consider extensions to the modelling of dynamic models with cointegrated variables such as the estimation of models with multiple cointegration vectors simultaneous systems models with seasonally integrated and cointegrated variables furthermore we illustrate the practical application of the techniques describes in the paper by means of a tutorial data set

economic development and the role of agricultural technology in earlier debates on economic development the agricultural sector s role was somewhat controversial while dualistic models highlighted the importance of agriculture the mainstream literature placed a greater emphasis on the creation of a modern industrial sector soon agriculture disappeared from the mainstream development literature to re emerge recently with a variety of multiple sector growth models emphasizing the key role of agriculture and specifically technology in agriculture this article is an empirical cross country analysis of agricultural technology s role in economic development specifically the hypothesis being tested is whether improvements in agricultural technology have a significant impact on long run economic growth the results indicate that agricultural modernization has a positive effect on both measures of economic growth and human development

is health care really a luxury in oecd countries evidence from alternative price deflators this article examines whether real health care expenditure he is a luxury or necessity for organization for economic co operation and development oecd countries over the period 1972 to 2004 within a panel unit root and panel cointegration framework to realize this objective we regress he on real gross domestic product gdp the proportion of the population aged over 65 p65 and a time trend t we first present results for 18 countries where real he per capita is obtained using a general gdp deflator for these countries we find that health care is a luxury for just one country next we present results for eight countries where real he is obtained using a specific health care price index when the general gdp deflator is replaced with a specific health care price index at least one of the gdp p65 or t coefficients for the eight countries changes in a reasonably dramatic fashion suggesting that the use of the gdp deflator introduces bias into the regression we find that he is a necessity in

health care is an individual necessity and a national luxury applying multilevel decision models to the analysis of health care expenditures health care is neither a necessity or a luxury it is both since the income elasticity varies with the level of analysis with insurance individual income elasticities are typically near zero while national health expenditure elasticities are commonly greater than 1 0 the debate over whether health care is or is not a luxury good arises primarily from the failure to specify levels of analysis clearly so as to distinguish variation within groups from variation between groups apparently contradictory empirical results are shown to be consistent with a simple nested multilevel model of health care spending

stationarity of health expenditures and gdp evidence from panel unit root tests with heterogeneous structural breaks this paper re examines the stationarity of national health care expenditures and gdp in a panel setting utilizing data from 20 oecd countries over the period from 1960 to 1997 previous research in this area has recognized the drawback of not allowing for structural breaks in their unit root tests and noted that their empirical results may not be robust we advance the literature by utilizing a recently developed panel lm unit root test that allows for heterogeneous level shifts in contrast to previous analyses that did not consider breaks our results reject the unit root null hypothesis for both series