Does the Health Care Kuznets Curve Exist? Evidence from China, 1949-2010
2013/03/29
研討會日期 : 2013-03-29
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Xuezheng Qin
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Xuezheng Qin received his Ph.D. in Economics from State University of New York at Buffalo in 2009. He is currently serving as Associate Professor of Economics at Peking University. His research field is in health economics, labor economics and applied econometrics.
演講摘要 : Geographic maldistribution of health care resources is one of the most persistent characteristics of the health care system around the world. The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate whether the rapid economic growth within a country contributes to ameliorate the disparity of health care resources across regions. Specifically, we use the dynamic convergence model that controls the unobserved province heterogeneity and spatial dependence to test whether the geographic distribution of health care resources is convergent or divergent in the long run and the role that the economic growth plays in this process. Based on China’s provincial-level panel data that cover the period between 1949 and 2010, the empirical results provide much support for β-convergence in the sense that the provinces with lower initial values in health care resources, including both the physician densities and hospital beds, tend to grow faster and catch up with the provinces with higher initial stocks. In addition, we find that GDP per capita has a significant non-linear impact on the convergence rate of health care resources, indicating the validity of Kuznets curve theory in China’s health sector. That is, the inequality in the distribution of health care resources follows an inverted “U” shape in relation to the income growth. An important implication of our study is that economic growth per se provides a build-in stabilizer to mitigate health inequality through the convergence of the health care resources across regions in the long-run.
