Do health expenditures ‘catch‐up’? Evidence from OECD countries
研究了1960-2000年间英国、加拿大、日本、瑞士和西班牙的人均卫生支出是否向美国追赶，发现考虑结构突变的检验支持追赶假说。
In this paper, we examine the 'catch-up' hypothesis, that is, whether or not per capita health expenditures of the UK, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, and Spain converge to the per capita health expenditures of the USA over the period 1960-2000. We propose a framework to examine convergence of health expenditures and use recent developments in unit root testing, namely the Lagrange multiplier univariate and panel approaches that allow for at most two structural breaks. Our main finding is that while univariate and panel tests that do not incorporate structural breaks fail to find evidence of convergence, univariate and panel LM tests that allow for structural breaks find strong evidence of convergence of per capita health expenditures of the UK, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, and Spain to that of the USA.