Analysis of public expenditure on health using state level data

Increasingly the governments are facing pressures to increase budgetary allocations to social sectors. Recently there has been suggestion to increase the government budget allocations to health sector and increase it to 3 per cent of GDP. Is this feasible goal and in what time-frame? Health being State subject in India and much depends on the ability of the State governments to allocate higher budgetary support to health sector. This inter alia depends on what are current levels of spending, what target spending as per cent of income the States assume to spend on health and given fundamental relationship between income levels and public expenditures, how fast expenditures can respond to rising income levels. We present analysis of public expenditures on health using state level public health expenditure data to provide preliminary analysis on these issues. The findings suggest that at state level governments have target of allocating only about 0.43 per cent of SGDP to health and medical care. This does not include the allocations received under central sponsored programmes such as family welfare. Given this level of spending at current levels and fiscal position of state governments the goal of spending 2 to 3 per cent of GDP on health looks very ambitious task. The analysis also suggests that elasticity of health expenditure when SGDP changes in only 0.68 which suggest that for every one percent increase in state per capita income the per capita public healthcare expenditure has increased by around 0.68 per cent.