The effects of pharmaceutical consumption on health and economic development.
Item
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Title
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The effects of pharmaceutical consumption on health and economic development.
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Identifier
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AAI9304718
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identifier
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9304718
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Creator
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Peters, Jonathan Richard.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Michael Grossman
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Date
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1992
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Economics, General | Health Sciences, Pharmacology | Sociology, Social Structure and Development
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Abstract
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This paper estimates the effects of pharmaceutical consumption, measured at the country level of aggregation, on health. We study the effect of a number of other inputs into health such as the number of physicians and auxiliary health workers per capita, nutrition, the population served by rural water supply, the economically active population that works in agriculture and a measure of income. We use a number of different measures of health status: infant mortality, life expectancy at various ages and child mortality. Using a double log model of health production, we find that our model explains the majority of the variation that is observed in our health variables. We also find that pharmaceutical consumption exhibits consistent and significant effects on the majority of our measures of health status.;We also studied the observable differences in the effects of gross pharmaceutical consumption on life expectancy for males and female in the OECD. We observe that increased consumption had significant positive effects earlier in the life cycle for females, and these effects were more pronounced than was observable in males. These results indicate that the kinds of pharmaceuticals consumed may be very important. It also may indicate that the observable effects we see in both infant mortality and life expectancy at birth may be related to women's health.;We also observe no systematic relationship between pharmaceutical consumption and child mortality. We therefore conclude that the most significant effects of pharmaceuticals seem to be linked to consumption by women.;We have explored a relationship that has been ignored in previous health production functions. Given that our results clearly show that pharmaceutical consumption has a positive effect on a number of measures of health status, we question the omission of it from future health production functions studies. We have also shown that pharmaceutical consumption improves a number of measures of health. Therefore there is some indication that less developed countries are not consuming adequate amounts of pharmaceuticals.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
