Does healthcare expenditure matter equally for all mental disorders? An international approach employing dynamic panel data methods.

BACKGROUND

In recent years mental health has increased its importance and gained the interest of many researchers around the world. It is now widely understood that the economic circumstances and financial constraints can affect people’s behavior. This paper aims to uncover the differences in the impact of healthcare expenditure and economic circumstance on several mental disorders.

METHODS

The methodology employed in this paper is the Arellano-Bond Generalized Method of Moments estimator applied to a dataset of 39 countries from 2005 to 2019 collected from World Data Bank and IHME, Global Burden of Disease.

RESULTS

The results show that only alcohol use disorders were affected by healthcare expenditure, not being this the case for bipolar, eating, drug use and depressive disorders.

CONCLUSIONS

This paper allows to know which mental disorders need more health expenditure in order to improve the situation of patients and, contrarily, which ones need certain policy changes. Indeed, this is the main contribution of this study.