An Analysis of Relationship between Health Expenditures and Life Expectancy: The Case of Turkey and Turkic Republics

Abstract

As one of the fundamental health outputs in the health economics literature, the improvement of life expectancy is one of the variables that positively affect economic growth. Many papers, investigating the relationship between health expenditure and life expectancy indicated that life expectancy has a positive effect on health expenditures. This study aims to investigate the relationship between life expectancy and health expenditures for the period of 2000-2015 in Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Panel data approach was used for the study. The results of panel cointegration analysis indicate that there is a significant bidirectional long-term relationship between the two variables.