IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/pubfin/v40y2012i4p470-496.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Long-Run Growth and Welfare Effects of Rising US Public Health Expenditure

Author

Listed:
  • Elwin Tobing
  • Jau-Lian Jeng

Abstract

The continuing increase of the US public health spending would inevitably lead to a reduction in productive government spending, higher taxes, or both. If the government enacts any of the policies, to what extent would the rising health care spending affect the long-run economic growth and welfare? Using an endogenous growth model where investment in education is the driving force of growth, our quantitative analysis shows that if health is a consumption good, such policies will reduce long-run growth and welfare. To finance public health spending at 20 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), a policy that simultaneously reduces productive government spending and raises tax rates could decrease the long-run growth by 0.7 percentage points and welfare by 14 percent. When health is both consumption and productive good, this policy reduces long-run growth and welfare modestly.

Suggested Citation

  • Elwin Tobing & Jau-Lian Jeng, 2012. "Long-Run Growth and Welfare Effects of Rising US Public Health Expenditure," Public Finance Review, , vol. 40(4), pages 470-496, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:pubfin:v:40:y:2012:i:4:p:470-496
    DOI: 10.1177/1091142112442238
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1091142112442238
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/1091142112442238?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Stokey, Nancy L & Rebelo, Sergio, 1995. "Growth Effects of Flat-Rate Taxes," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 103(3), pages 519-550, June.
    2. Halliday, Timothy J. & He, Hui & Ning, Lei & Zhang, Hao, 2019. "Health Investment Over The Life-Cycle," Macroeconomic Dynamics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 23(1), pages 178-215, January.
    3. King, Robert G. & Levine, Ross, 1994. "Capital fundamentalism, economic development, and economic growth," Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, Elsevier, vol. 40(1), pages 259-292, June.
    4. Mikael Lindahl & Alan B. Krueger, 2001. "Education for Growth: Why and for Whom?," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 39(4), pages 1101-1136, December.
    5. Glomm, Gerhard & Ravikumar, B., 1997. "Productive government expenditures and long-run growth," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 21(1), pages 183-204, January.
    6. Barro, Robert J, 1990. "Government Spending in a Simple Model of Endogenous Growth," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 98(5), pages 103-126, October.
    7. Berta Rivera, 2001. "The effects of public health spending on self-assessed health status: an ordered probit model," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 33(10), pages 1313-1319.
    8. Card, David & Krueger, Alan B, 1992. "Does School Quality Matter? Returns to Education and the Characteristics of Public Schools in the United States," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 100(1), pages 1-40, February.
    9. Robert E. Hall & Charles I. Jones, 2007. "The Value of Life and the Rise in Health Spending," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 122(1), pages 39-72.
    10. T. Paul Schultz, 1999. "Health and Schooling Investments in Africa," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 13(3), pages 67-88, Summer.
    11. Grossman, Michael, 1972. "On the Concept of Health Capital and the Demand for Health," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 80(2), pages 223-255, March-Apr.
    12. Blankenau, William F. & Simpson, Nicole B., 2004. "Public education expenditures and growth," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 73(2), pages 583-605, April.
    13. Viscusi, W Kip & Evans, William N, 1990. "Utility Functions That Depend on Health Status: Estimates and Economic Implications," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 80(3), pages 353-374, June.
    14. Lucas, Robert E, Jr, 1990. "Supply-Side Economics: An Analytical Review," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 42(2), pages 293-316, April.
    15. King, Robert G & Rebelo, Sergio, 1990. "Public Policy and Economic Growth: Developing Neoclassical Implications," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 98(5), pages 126-150, October.
    16. Schultz, T. Paul & Tansel, Aysit, 1997. "Wage and labor supply effects of illness in Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana: instrumental variable estimates for days disabled," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 53(2), pages 251-286, August.
    17. Andreas Irmen & Johanna Kuehnel, 2009. "Productive Government Expenditure And Economic Growth," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 23(4), pages 692-733, September.
    18. Holtz-Eakin, Douglas, 1994. "Public-Sector Capital and the Productivity Puzzle," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 76(1), pages 12-21, February.
    19. Garcia-Mila, Teresa & McGuire, Therese J., 1992. "The contribution of publicly provided inputs to states' economies," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 22(2), pages 229-241, June.
    20. Behrman, Jere R & Birdsall, Nancy, 1983. "The Quality of Schooling: Quantity Alone is Misleading," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 73(5), pages 928-946, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Baier, Scott L. & Glomm, Gerhard, 2001. "Long-run growth and welfare effects of public policies with distortionary taxation," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 25(12), pages 2007-2042, December.
    2. Tobing, Elwin, 2011. "Taxation, human capital formation, and long-run growth with private investment in education," Journal of Asian Economics, Elsevier, vol. 22(1), pages 48-60, February.
    3. Konstantinos Angelopoulos & Jim Malley & Apostolis Philippopoulos, 2007. "Public Education Expenditure, Growth and Welfare," CESifo Working Paper Series 2037, CESifo.
    4. Engen, Eric M. & Skinner, Jonathan, 1996. "Taxation and Economic Growth," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 49(4), pages 617-642, December.
    5. Davis, Lewis S., 2003. "The division of labor and the growth of government," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 27(7), pages 1217-1235, May.
    6. Kneller, Richard & Bleaney, Michael F. & Gemmell, Norman, 1999. "Fiscal policy and growth: evidence from OECD countries," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 74(2), pages 171-190, November.
    7. Valentinyi, Ákos, 2002. "Gazdasági növekedés, felzárkózás és költségvetési politika [Economic growth, catching up, and fiscal policy]," Közgazdasági Szemle (Economic Review - monthly of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Közgazdasági Szemle Alapítvány (Economic Review Foundation), vol. 0(1), pages 1-23.
    8. Tobing, Elwin, 2011. "Public health spending, tax reform, and long-run growth," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 112(1), pages 119-121, July.
    9. Hammed Adetola Adefeso, 2016. "Productive Government Expenditure and Economic Performance in sub-Saharan Africa: An Empirical Investigation," Zagreb International Review of Economics and Business, Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Zagreb, vol. 19(2), pages 1-18, November.
    10. Gerhard Glomm & Juergen Jung, 2010. "A Macroeconomic Analysis of the Fiscal System in Egypt," Working Papers 2010-17, Towson University, Department of Economics, revised Oct 2010.
    11. Freddy Heylen & Renaat Van de Kerckhove, 2014. "Heterogeneous ability and the effects of fiscal policy on employment, income and welfare in general equilibrium," Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium 14/898, Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration.
    12. Chiara DEL BO, 2009. "Recent advances in public investment, fiscal policy and growth," Departmental Working Papers 2009-25, Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at Università degli Studi di Milano.
    13. Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti & Nouriel Roubini, 1995. "Growth Effects of Income and Consumption Taxes: Positive and Normative Analysis," Working Papers 95-18, New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, Department of Economics.
    14. Günther Rehme, 2011. "Endogenous Policy And Cross‐Country Growth Empirics," Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Scottish Economic Society, vol. 58(2), pages 262-296, May.
    15. George Economides & Jim Malley & Apostolis Philippopoulos & Ulrich Woitek, 2003. "Electoral Uncertainty, Fiscal Policies & Growth: Theory and Evidence from Germany, the UK and the US," CESifo Working Paper Series 1072, CESifo.
    16. Silvia Bertarelli, 2006. "Public capital and growth," Politica economica, Società editrice il Mulino, issue 3, pages 361-398.
    17. Daniele Tavani & Luca Zamparelli, 2020. "Growth, income distribution, and the ‘entrepreneurial state’," Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Springer, vol. 30(1), pages 117-141, January.
    18. YAN Chengliang & GONG Liutang, 2009. "Government expenditure, taxation and long-run growth," Frontiers of Economics in China-Selected Publications from Chinese Universities, Higher Education Press, vol. 4(4), pages 505-525, December.
    19. John Creedy & Norman Gemmell, 2005. "Publicly financed education in an endogenous growth model," Journal of Economic Studies, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 32(2), pages 114-131, April.
    20. Durusu-Ciftci, Dilek & Gokmenoglu, Korhan K. & Yetkiner, Hakan, 2018. "The heterogeneous impact of taxation on economic development: New insights from a panel cointegration approach," Economic Systems, Elsevier, vol. 42(3), pages 503-513.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:pubfin:v:40:y:2012:i:4:p:470-496. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.