Effect of Health Expenditure on Child Health in Sub-Saharan Africa: Governance Perspective

Abstract

Though child mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa has declined since 2000, they are still higher than other regions of the world. This has provided impetus for increasing effectiveness of health expenditure through improved quality of governance in the health sector. Dynamic panel estimation method was used to estimate panel data for 41 SSA countries for the period 2000 to 2009. The results show that public health expenditure relative to private health expenditure led to fall in under-five mortality rates in SSA. When corruption was controlled for effectiveness of public health expenditure on reducing under-five mortality was evident. Additionally, regional variations in effectiveness of health expenditure on under-five mortality was also realized. SSA countries are likely to benefit from reduced corruption which has an impact on effectiveness of health expenditure on child health outcomes.