The Relationship of Health Expenditures per Capita and Inflation in Turkey

Abstract

Health expenditures and the components of it have been a matter of curiosity in the process from past to present. For this reason, health expenditures, which are affected by more than one factor, have remained the subject of research in all aspects. In this study, health expenditures were taken into account as per capita, and it was tried to be explained with economic factors that were less studied in the literature. Thus, the relationship between the consumer price index (CPI) and the producer price index (PPI) and per capita health expenditures were tried to be determined in order to contribute to the current data. In this study covering the period between 2000 and 2020, the relationship between health expenditures and CPI and PPI was tried to be determined by using the vector autoregression (VAR) model, VAR-Granger, impulse-response analysis, and variance decomposition method. According to the results obtained, the source of health expenditures per capita is more PPI than CPI. At the same time, the most important variable explaining the changes in the CPI is health expenditures.