Health care expenditures and GDP in Latin American and OECD countries: a comparison using a panel cointegration approach

This paper provides empirical evidence of the existence of a long-run causal relationship between GDP and health care expenditures, for a group of Latin American and the Caribbean countries and for OECD countries for the period 1995-2014. We estimated the income elasticity of health expenditure to be equal to unity for both groups of countries, that is, health care in Latin American and OECD countries is a necessity rather than a luxury. We did...