Effect Of Social Capital And Financial Medical Expenditure On Residents’ Health

With the progress and transition of modern society,people prefer to focus on enhancing their own health condition,and gradually realize the important role of external resources in maintaining residents’ health.A large number of theoretical and empirical studies show that both the social capital of individual residents and the financial medical expenditure of government finance have irreplaceable functions in public finance.for the purpose of carrying out the "Healthy China initiative" proposed in the report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China preferably,this paper attempts to explore the impact of social capital and financial medical expenditure on the health status of Chinese residents and its mechanism from the perspective of resource acquisition.First of all,from the perspective of resource acquisition,the following hypotheses are proposed to be tested:firstly,the improvement of residents’ social capital and the increase of government financial medical expenditure will jointly promote the improvement of residents’health status;Secondly,social capital can improve residents’ health by enhancing physical activity,improving cultural cognition and expanding information channels,while fiscal decentralization and social capital will adjust the impact of financial medical expenditure on residents’ health.Around the hypothesis to be tested,this paper chooses per capita fiscal health care expenditure to measure the strength of local governments to provide public service resources,and the social capital is divided into two types which are structural and cognitive social capital.The data from the National Bureau of Statistics and the questionnaire data of the China General Social Survey(CGSS)from 2012 to 2017 were selected for typical fact description.The statistical results preliminarily show that both local government financial medical expenditure and individual social capital are closely related to residents’ health,and social capital may affect residents’ health status by influencing their physical exercise frequency,cultural cognition level and information acquisition ability.Secondly,based on the mixed cross-sectional data from 2012 to 2017,this paper uses the fixed effect model for regression analysis,and uses the instrumental variable method to solve the possible endogeneity problem of structural social capital,and examines the impact of social capital and financial medical expenditure on residents’ physical and mental health from different dimensions.The empirical results show that structural social capital,cognitive social capital and financial medical expenditure all have a significant positive impact on residents’health.This conclusion is still valid after a series of robustness tests such as endogeneity and changing estimation methods.The heterogeneity study further finds that the improvement of cognitive social capital has a greater impact on the health status of residents at both physical and psychological levels,while the marginal utility of structural social capital and financial medical expenditure is stronger for the relatively vulnerable groups.Thirdly,this paper further examines the mechanism by which social capital and financial medical expenditure affect residents’ health.First of all,this paper adopts the method of multiplication and finds that social capital and financial medical expenditure have a certain interaction in the process of affecting residents’ health.Structural social capital plays a substitute role,and cognitive social capital plays a complementary role.Secondly,using the moderating effect model,it is further found that the health utility of financial medical expenditure on residents will be affected by the moderating factor of fiscal decentralization.Finally,the Sobel test and Bootstrap test are used to examine the mediating mechanism of the impact of social capital on residents’ health.It is found that different social capitals can affect residents’ health by increasing the frequency of physical exercise,enhancing cultural cognition and expanding external information acquisition channels to show a significant positive impact.Finally,on the basis of the conclusions of this paper,we emphasize that while taking into account the maintenance of social network and the reasonable supply of public service resources,more efforts should be made to create a social environment with high trust,reciprocity and happiness for residents,and we also need to increase the intensity and scale of local government spending on financial health care,in order to play the role of external resources in improving residents’ health more effectively.