Financial performance drivers in <scp>BRICS</scp> healthcare companies: Locally estimated scatterplot smoothing partial utility functions

Abstract The Healthcare sector is increasing in importance and relative size BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). Despite relevance, the financial performance of their healthcare companies has been scarcely studied. This research fills this literature gap not only by focusing on impacts such diverse business environments providers but also proposing a novel approach to estimate an overall index based weighted additive utility functions given set criteria. Precisely, bootstrapped Singular Value Decomposition cornerstone for identifying orthogonal base rotated criteria, upon which partial (PUFs) are estimated using locally scatterplot smoothing (LOESS) polynomial regression. A compromise weighting scheme between singular values quadratic programming results minimal covariance joint entropy matrices residuals was used summing up PUFs. Results indicate that range 0.7 0.85. We further find current assets, level debt liability, company's Tobin Q related performance. Besides, freedom, government integrity, tax burden, monetary freedom spending determinants