Pharmaceutical spending and health outcomes in the united states

Although previous studies have attempted to isolate the effect of pharmaceutical spending on health outcomes, most have been limited by analysis of inherently heterogeneous inter-country data. This study focuses on one particular health outcome — infant mortality at the state level in the U.S. — and shows that its important determinants include: (1) pharmaceutical expenditures; (2) health economic infrastructure (e.g. number of practicing physicians, number of hospital beds); (3) socio-demographics (e.g. teenage birth rate, low-weight births, high school graduation rate, racial composition of state population); and (4) state-level economic aggregates (e.g. a disposable income, percent of population below the poverty line).