Measurement Of Spill-Over Effects Of Government Health Expenditure On Poverty Reduction

Throughout the world,both developed and developing countries can never escape a common topic: poverty.The history of the world is a history of the development of mankind and the struggle of the people of the world and poverty.As the largest developing country in the world,this problem is particularly prominent in our country."Building a well-off society in an all-round way" is a guarantee made by the Chinese government at the 18 th National Congress.A comprehensive well-off society is not only a well-off society for all,but also a well-off society.The health care problem is an important part of this strategic goal.From the government’s point of view,a large proportion of fiscal expenditure is used for health at all levels.For the people,medical and health services are the basic guarantee for people’s lives and a prerequisite for all economic activities.It can be seen that the importance of medical and health conditions for poverty reduction in China cannot be underestimated.Most of the poor people in China are concentrated in the central and western regions and ethnic minority areas;the urban-rural poverty gap is large,and the rural poverty problem is more prominent;the gap between the rich and the poor is greater,and the rich are richer and poorer.These conditions lead to poverty in our country.The problem is getting worse,forcing us to step up and overcome this difficulty.In general,the scale of total government health expenditure in China has increased exponentially.However,with the advancement of market economic system reform,China’s gross domestic product,total health expenditure and fiscal expenditure have increased rapidly,but government health expenditure accounts for these three parts.There is no obvious upward trend in the proportion.In addition,the allocation of government health expenditures between urban and rural medical service institutions is uneven,and there are huge differences in government health expenditures between different provinces and between different regions.Although China’s medical and health services have been gradually strengthened over the years,Globally,China’s per capita government health spending is still at a low level.Although in recent years,the state has increased its investment in health services in order to alleviate the problem of “difficulty in seeing a doctor and expensive medical treatment”.Although the scale of government health expenditure has increased year by year,Chinese residents have become poor due to illness and have returned to poverty due to illness."The problem has been effectively alleviated,but we also see that poverty is still one of the most important livelihood issues in our country.Therefore,effectively measuring the poverty reduction effect of government health expenditure to further optimize the government’s health expenditure structure has become a focus of attention of the government and scholars.By combing the domestic and foreign scholars’ research on government public expenditure and poverty alleviation,the current research on the effect of government public expenditure on poverty reduction is mainly divided into three methods: spatial spillover effect,regression analysis as the method and threshold effect.These three methods each have their own advantages and disadvantages.However,there are relatively few studies on the poverty alleviation effect of government health expenditure in China.Most of them are the research on the poverty alleviation effect of education expenditure or agricultural expenditure.Therefore,the research on poverty reduction effect of government health expenditure is to fill this part of the vacancy.In view of this,this paper adopts a combination of theoretical and empirical research methods,based on the panel data of 20 provinces in China from 2000 to 2016,using STATA14.0 to qualitatively and quantitatively analyze the poverty alleviation effect of government health expenditure.At the same time,based on the research perspective of spatial econometrics,the global spatial Moran’I index was constructed and the spatial Dubin model was constructed to further analyze the impact of government health expenditure on the FGT index.The results show that there is a certain spillover effect on the incidence of poverty,whether it is local government health expenditure or central government health expenditure.This indicates that the incidence of poverty in a region will be affected by the government’s health expenditure in neighboring regions,thus increasing government health.Expenditure can indirectly alleviate the incidence of rural poverty in neighboring provinces and achieve poverty reduction through spatial spillover effects between neighboring provinces.However,for the poverty gap rate and the squared poverty gap,there is a spillover effect on per capita local government health expenditure,and there is almost no spillover effect on the central government’s health expenditure.This may be because the central government’s health expenditure includes central transfer payments,and the central transfer payment refers to the part of the government’s fiscal funds raised in the form of taxation used to pay social welfare and financial subsidies to narrow the gap between regional economic development.Due to the difference in economic level and population,central transfer payments are also very different.With the help of central transfer payments,the gaps between regions are filled more evenly.Therefore,the spillover effect of central government’s health expenditure on poverty reduction is almost non-existent..Finally,in response to the above research,the following suggestions are made to the government: coordinate regional health resource allocation,narrow the gap between regional government health expenditures;balance government health expenditure compensation for supply and demand;improve government transfer payment system,narrow urban-rural gap,and gradually realize urban and rural Integrating health care systems;alleviating poverty by increasing government health expenditures in neighboring regions;raising people’s health awareness and radically reducing poverty due to illness.