ECONOMIC IMPACT OF HEALTHCARE SYSTEMS: AN INTER-COUNTRY INPUT-OUTPUT APPROACH

The process of globalisation in the sector of health services offers multiple facets. In this paper we study the economic impact of National Health Service expenditures on the whole economy from a global and international perspective. By means of the OECD Input-Output Tables and the Inter-Countries Input-Output database, we will analyse the existence of a gap between total and domestic output multipliers obtained from the Leontief inverse. Although there are marked differences among countries, in average terms, for the 62 countries included in the OECD IOT, we observed the stagnation of domestic output multipliers in the health sector, while total multipliers increased between 1995 and 2011. The initial hypothesis links the observed gap with the process of globalisation and the intensification of imported inputs in the health service sector. This hypothesis will be confirmed with a difference in differences model designed for this purpose.