Fiscal Health Expenditure And Economic Growth: Evidence From 255 Chinese Prefecture-level Cities

Exploring the way to realize economic growth is an important topic in the field of economic research.Health,like education,is a form of human capital.The increase in health expenditure seems to be simply a consequence of economic growth.And if an increase in health expenditure can be a driver of economic growth,then it is undoubtedly important for a country to increase health expenditure.However,no matter in the past policies or scholars’ studies,the fiscal health expenditure is regarded as an expenditure to guarantee the national health,and its role in China’s economic growth is ignored.In addition,most Chinese scholars’ research on the fiscal health expenditure is limited to the time series data at the national level or the panel data at the provincial level,so there is still a gap in the research on the fiscal health expenditure at the prefecture-level.In view of this,this paper mainly discusses the role of China’s fiscal health expenditure on economic growth.This paper mainly uses the data of 255 prefecture-level cities in China from 2009 to2016 to empirically test the impact of fiscal health expenditure on economic growth and its mechanism.The main content of this paper is divided into the following parts: At the beginning,it mainly introduces the background of the topic,research significance,content,innovations and deficiencies,and sorts out the literature related to the research content of this paper.Secondly,this paper mainly for medical and health care,fiscal health expenditure,health human capital and related concepts.Combined with the theory of government intervention,the necessity of the existence of fiscal health expenditure is expounded,the mechanism of the effect of fiscal health expenditure on economic growth is expounded,and the research hypothesis is proposed.Finally,in terms of the empirical strategy,this paper adopts the bidirectional fixed effect model to empirically test the effect of China’s fiscal health expenditure on economic growth from the perspectives of the whole and the regions,and conducts the robustness test.In addition,this paper further tests the mechanism of the influence of fiscal health expenditure on economic growth from the perspective of health human capital and material capital accumulation.According to the empirical test results of 255 prefecture-level cities in China,the fiscal health expenditure in China does have the effect of promoting economic growth,which is also confirmed by further discussion of the sample.This shows that China should accelerate the proportion of health expenditure in GDP,and the financial sector should see the important role of fiscal health expenditure in China’s economic growth,instead of treating it only as a kind of expenditure to ensure the health of residents.Through further mechanism test,it can also be seen that China’s fiscal health expenditure improves the level of human capital of health.Based on the research results,this paper puts forward several policy suggestions: first,change the government’s policy concept and strengthen the strategic position of health policy;second,strengthen the position of the government in health financing,improve the reasonable and effective fiscal health expenditure mechanism;third,strengthen the performance assessment of government health expenditure.