A Silent Crisis: The Impact of Public Health Expenditure on Malnutrition Prevalence in Children Aged Below Five in the Philippines

This study mainly aims to determine whether public health expenditures have been effective in reducing malnutrition among children aged below five in the Philippines. The researchers construct a Grossman (1972) model-based health production function, which treats economic, social, and environmental factors as determinants of nutritional status. OLS estimates show that an increase in food security rates, a decrease in poverty incidence rates, and an increase in the level of urbanization significantly reduce stunting rates. However, no statistically significant relationship exists between the aforementioned independent variables and underweight and wasting rates (aside from the level of urbanization and wasting). In all regression models, the coefficient estimate for public health expenditure is valued near zero and is statistically insignificant, implying that government spending on health has been insubstantial and ineffective in reducing malnutrition prevalence.

The European Health Union: European Union’s Concern about Health for All. Concepts, Definition, and Scenarios

The COVID-19 pandemic brought visibility and intensified the discussions on the European Union’s (EU) health mandate. The proposals of the European Commission (EC) to move towards a European Health Union (EHU) can be seen as a starting point towards more integration in health. However, the definition of what the EHU will look like is not clear. This paper searches to find a common definition, and/or features for this EHU through a systematic literature review performed in May 2021. “European Union’s concern about health for all” is suggested as a definition. The main drivers identified to develop an EHU are: surveillance and monitoring, crisis preparedness, funding, political will, vision of public health expenditures, population’s awareness and interest, and global health. Based on these findings, five scenarios were developed: making a full move towards supranational action; improving efficiency in the actual framework; more coordination but no real change; in a full intergovernmentalism direction; and fragmentation of the EU. The scenarios show that the development of a EHU is possible inside the current legal framework. However, it will rely on increased coordination and has a focus on cross-border health threats. Any development will be strongly linked to political choices from Member States.

Short-Term Health Policy Responses to Crisis and Uncertainty

The onset of the economic crisis more than a decade ago posed extreme challenges to health care systems that may now be repeated with the COVID-19 pandemic. The resulting policies produced a wide range of (in some cases, even opposite) outcomes: increased or decreased public expenditures for health care. Curiously, however, countries that were considered particularly hard hit by the economic crisis showed different extremes of policy outcomes. Investigating these developments requires a dynamic view and identifying explanations for government action in one direction or the other. Using the lenses of several theoretical perspectives in public policy research, this article analyses the conditions under which public health expenditures changed in European Union member states after the financial crisis. Why did certain countries, at first sight similarly affected, show opposite outcomes? A Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) confirms that left-wing governments and coordinated market economies, in combination and alone, tended to increase public health expenditures in the short term, whereas countries where neither of these conditions was present decreased public health expenditures.

Improving the management of public health expenditure through the active implementation of results-based budgeting

В работе отмечена важность совершенствования управления государственными расходами на здравоохранение посредством активного внедрения бюджетирования, ориентированного на результат. В работе сформулированы такие предложения как создание государственной корпорации Росздрав, повышение прозрачности оказания медицинской помощи, поиск дополнительных инструментов финансового обеспечения (краудфандинг) и его применение при реализации социальных проектов медицинской направленности и др. The article highlights the importance of improving the management of public health expenditures through the active implementation of results-based budgeting. The article contains such proposals as the creation of the state Corporation Roszdrav, increasing the transparency of medical care, searching for additional financial support tools (crowdfunding) and its application in the implementation of social projects of medical orientation, etc.