The Impact of Health Expenditure on Maternal and Child Mortality in African countries

Abstract

The world has experienced a decline in maternal and child mortality in the last few decades, increase in global health expenditure over the years was the major factor responsible for that. But in Africa and other developing countries, the rate of maternal and child mortality has been soaring. The objective of this paper is to investigate the impact of health expenditure on maternal and child mortality in African countries at different income level. On this note, the paper was based on the panel data covering the period of 2000 to 2017 for 39 African countries. After a cross sectional dependence test and panel unit root test, fixed effect results showed that, government health expenditure has no significant impact on reducing child mortality in African countries at all income level. Whereas, it has an impact on reducing the maternal mortality in low-income and lower middle income countries. It was also found that Private health expenditure has significant impact on reducing child and maternal mortality at all income level. Based on this, the paper recommends that governments at different level especially from low-income and lower middle income countries should provide quality health care services and regular immunization for women and children in order to reduce maternal and child mortality in Africa region.

Keywords

• child mortality
• maternal mortality
• immunization
• government health expenditure
• private health expenditure
• adolescence