Resources of Educational and Healthcare Industries and Population Welfare: Comparative Analysis in Post-socialist and OECD Countries

Abstract

This article is devoted to defining Ukraine’s position among 28 OECD countries relative to the averaged line of connection between resources of the social sphere and the society achievements in terms of human development index. Such positioning allows us to obtain a comparative assessment of the effectiveness of usage resource, directed to funding the education and healthcare by OECD countries and Ukraine. The model that expresses the HDI dependence on three main groups of factors was used. First – the amount of education and healthcare resources (evaluated by private and public spending on education and healthcare per capita). The second – is the way of rationing the population's access to these industries products (evaluated by coefficients of inequality of life expectancy and inequality in education). The third – is the indicators, displaying the efficiency of resources using within the industry (estimated as a result of modeling). Our results have confirmed that the resources, allocated to the public sector of education have the most significant impact on HDI size and this indicator is more dependent on the amount of social sphere resources in post-socialist countries than in "old" OECD members. The actual level of HDI in Ukraine is lower than estimated by model-averaged for countries, included in the sample. This means that Ukraine uses resources of its social sphere with lower efficiency than observed as average for countries, included in the sample. Such results allow us to obtain assessment which part of restrictions and problem experienced by national social spheres is caused by the scarcity of resources, divided to social sphere funding, and which – by imperfections, inherent to the regulative institutions of the social sphere. Such results may serve as a significant precondition of social policy development, especially for post-soviet countries.