The paper investigates empirically the impact of ethnic heterogeneity on the amount of public spending on health and education and the quality, or “technical efficiency” of spending. While it finds partial evidence for the claim that more heterogeneous societies spend less on public goods,...

Government intervention to correct market failures is often accompanied by government failures and corruption. This is no more evident than in social sectors that are characterized by significant market failures and government intervention. However, the impact of corruption on the public...

Using data for a sample of developing and transition countries, this paper estimates the relationship between government spending on health care and education, and social indicators. Unlike previous studies, where social indicators are used as proxies for the unobservable health and education...

This paper estimates the magnitude and speed of tax pass-through across tobacco products at different price points in Pakistan by using a novel dataset of monthly observations on cigarette prices in 50 cities during the period 2004-2015. The pass-through of cigarette taxes to retail prices is...

Demands for ramping up health expenditures are at an all-time high. Countries' needs for additional health resources include responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, closing gaps in achieving the Sustainable Development Goal in health in most emerging and developing countries, and serving an ageing...

Health spending has risen rapidly in Japan. We find two-thirds of the spending increase over 1990–2011 resulted from ageing, and the rest from excess cost growth. The spending level will rise further: ageing alone will raise it by 31⁄2 percentage points of GDP over 2010–30, and excess cost...

To shed light on the possible scarring effects from Covid-19, this paper studies the economic effects of five past pandemics using local projections on a sample of fifty-five countries over 1990-2019. The findings reveal that pandemics have detrimental medium-term effects on output,...

Public health spending is low in emerging and developing economies relative to advanced economies and health outputs and outcomes need to be substantially improved. Simply increasing public expenditure in the health sector, however, may not significantly affect health outcomes if the efficiency...

We estimate the additional health spending necessary to treat COVID-19 patients. We expand a Susceptible Infected Recovered model to project the number of people requiring hospitalization, use information about healthcare costs by country, and make assumptions about capacity constraints in the...

The paper develops a simple, integrated methodology to project public pension cash flows and healthcare spending over the long term. We illustrate its features by applying it to the LAC5 (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico), where public spending pressures are expected to increase...