The Effect of Trade Openness on Health Indicators in OIC Members

Despite its public and non-commercial nature, health sector has been considerably affected by globalization. The present study examines the relationship between trade openness and health indicators using panel data from the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) members during the period 1995-2014. For this purpose, a panel co-integration model with cross-sectional dependency and Continuously-updated and Fully-Modified (Cup-FM) method have been used. The results of the model estimation show that trade openness has a positive and significant effect on the health indicators in the OIC members. Also, results show a negative sign of the interaction between trade liberalization and income per capita, which implies that the partial impact of trade openness on health indicators in the OIC members decreases as the income per capita increases.