An inquiry into the achievements in health outcomes of Bangladesh: role of health expenditure, income, governance and female education

Abstract

Purpose Bangladesh is applauded for its achievement in various health and social outcomes though criticized for its failure in properly dealing with governance issues. The purpose of this paper is intends to see how the health outcomes (in case of life expectancy, under-five mortality and adolescent fertility) are impacted by health expenditure (both public and private), per capita income in presence of overall governance and female education. This paper assumes that rapid progress in female education reflects the Bangladeshis’ social responsiveness to change. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses autoregressive distributed lag technique to estimate the models with data ranges from 1990 to 2016 under two different scenarios. Findings This study has found that all the explanatory variables exert significant impact on health outcomes. Furthermore, public health expenditure is augmented with a composite governance issue, and this enhances robustness as well as statistical significance of the models. These suggest that the governance issues play a very crucial role to achieve the expected health outcomes. Female secondary enrolment ratio appears with improved coefficients in terms of sign and magnitude for all the health indicators. Originality/value This paper contributes to the existing literature showing econometric evidence that highlights the importance of governance and female education in improving health outcomes of Bangladesh apart from health expenditure and per capita gross domestic product.