An Analysis of the Relative Importance of Social, Educational and Environmental Expenditures on Life Expectancy at Birth. Evidence from Europe

The framework of this chapter is the analysis of health expenditure as a variable which, from an intuitive point of view, must be positively correlated with life expectancy at birth. Traditionally, health outcomes have been studied from a macroeconomic perspective without taking into account new categories of public expenditures related to health such as social, educational and environmental protection expenditures. In consequence, the objective of this chapter is to investigate the relative importance of these public expenditures on health outcomes. The employed methodology is based on the main metrics which analyze the relative importance, by using the data of twenty-five European countries for the period 1995–2017. This study has found that social expenditure has the greatest relative importance on explaining life expectancy. On the other hand, our results show that public educational expenditure has the least relative importance. Finally, there is no evidence demonstrating the extent to which environmental expenditure contributes to improve population health.