Health and Democracy

This paper explores these issues further by reconsidering the link between democracy and health using panel data from a cross-section of countries. The data show a strong (conditional) correlation between life expectancy and democracy. This relationship is strongest for the decades of the 1960s and 1970s and is robust to controlling for the initial level of human capital as well as political histories. The data also suggest that health policy interventions are superior in democracies.The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In the next section,we discuss some background issues. In Section III, we present the results and the possible interpretations of these empirical …findings. Section IV concludes.[...]