Effects of democracy and religious polarization on public health expenditure and health outcomes

Provision of public health service is essential for socia-economic development. Despite the impact of democracy on public health expenditure and health outcomes have been intensively studied, very little effort has been devoted to investigate the combined effect of democracy and ethnic heterogeneity on public health expenditure and health outcomes. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of democracy and ethnic heterogeneity on public health expenditure and public health outcomes This study will first focus on one of the most important aspects of public healthcare: public health expenditures. This is simply because public health expenditures are related to all health infrastructure, medical goods and service. When a country has sufficient public health resource, only then it can ensure all individuals would have access to public healthcare. To understand this, panel data from 141 countries from between 1995 to 2015 and dynamic panel models were used to capture the relationship between democracy and public health expenditures in various demographic backgrounds. Next, we discuss the effects of democracy on the minority health issue on human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infections. Although the HIV epidemic does have a certain impact on group of people living with HIV, the incentive for governments to respond to HIV prevalence may be limited. This is because the voter group affected by HIV is relatively small. This situation is more likely to occur in democracy than in autocratic countries. Thus, this study examines the role of democracy in combating HIV as a minority health issue using dynamic panel data model with a panel data of 9a sample countries from 19a9 to 2015. Last but not least, this study intends to further explore the relationship between democracy and life expectancy in various demographic backgrounds. Life expectancy is most frequently used to measure the population's health and used widely by policymakers and researchers on health-related researches. To achieve the objectives of the study, we used panel data from 120 sample countries from 1990 to 2014 to determine the effect of democracy and religious polarization on life expectancy. Our empirical findings suggest that the relationship between democracies and public health expenditure depends on the level of religious polarization. We also found that democracy will have different impacts on prevalence of HIV when the level of religious polarization in that country is different. In particular, democracies together with higher level of religious polarization will reduce the minority health issues. Lastly, our empirical results confirm that democratization will result in longer life expectancies.

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