Examining the Spatial Spillover Effects of Misery Index on Health Care Expenditure in Selected Developing Countries

The impact of different effective factors on health expenditure appears in the public health and health promotion. Health is a key element in economic, social, and political development and has an important role in different infrastructure of society. Considering the previous studies in this field with the classic assumption and according to the fact that existence of spatial dependence between the observations and disregarding these effects, the method of estimating conventional econometrics will be biased. Therefore, the main aim of this study is to consider the spatial dependence between observations.
we use spatial econometrics model and spatial Durbin model in order to analyze the effective variables on health expenditure in 79 selected developing countries during (1995-2014).
The empirical results have indicated that there is a significant negative relationship between misery index and health expenditure. It means that if the weighted average of the logarithms of misery index increases 1 percent in neighboring countries, the average logarithm of health expenditures will decrease 0.13 percent in targeted country. Moreover, the effects of per capita income (0.54) and life expectancy (0.49) on per capita health care expenditure are significantly positive.
The results of this study indicate that if governments do not have appropriate policies to prevent the illegal immigration of foreign nationals and face difficulties in employing labor in their country, the health of the community will be compromised in long term because of the escalation of unemployment and Lack of inhibition of inflation.