Convergence Study Of Government Health Care Expenditure Based On The Provincial Panel Data

A new round of health care reform has been proposed by the State Council in the year of2009, which outlines the blueprint of the gradually realization of universal access to basic medical and health service. As an important mean to achieve the objective of Health Care Reform, the government health care expenditure has improved rapidly. While the increase of government health care expenditure does not mean that our everybody enjoys the resources and services equality, the data shows that health resources and services are different across different regions in China. The existence of this gap will seriously affect the configuration of health care resources, which is not conductive to basic health services shared goals. Therefore, we choose the convergence of government health care expenditure as the study topic, analysizing whether there existence convergence across different regions, identifying the factors which affecting the government health care expenditure and the convergence, proposing countermeasures to improve the convergence speed. If there exists convergence among all of provinces and regions, the absolute expenditure of government health care and the growth rate would tend to be the same, the differences among provinces and regions will diminish gradually. The all of the study are special to realize universal access to basic health services.This paper is based on decreasing returns of capital and technology diffusion theory, using σ convergence to confirm whether there is a long-term convergence trend over China and the East, Central and West areas. Applying classic absolute β convergence and the newly developed method of stochastic convergence to analysis the convergence of growth rate of government health care in China. Then including economic factors, social factors and health factors in the conditional β convergence to study. At the end, according to China’s actual situation, we devided China into three clubs, study the absolute and conditional convergence for each club, then compare the results across each club. The empirical results show:the whole country and the eastern and central area existence of σ convergence, while there is no σ convergence exists in western regions; whole country and the Eastern, Central and West regions do not exist absolute convergence trend; whole country and the Eastern, Central and West regions exist conditional convergence trend, the coefficient symbol of per GDP, population aging and numbers of beds in medical situations are all the same when comparing the results of three clubs and the whole contry. While the remaining factors that affect the clubs show the contrary symbol.Thus, we propose the following suggestions to improve the convergence rate of government health care expenditure increase the government health care expenditure scale and quality of some areas in China, gradually increase the education level of residents, improve the country’s fiscal decentralization system, adjust and optimize the transfer payment system...