The Effects of Learning and Scale Economies in Health Sector: Case of Developed and Developing Countries

The quality and quantity of human capital are the most important factors in economic growth and its expansion depends on the educational and health infrastructure of countries. The education sector promotes the technical knowledge and skills of the human resources and the health sector provides its health; In addition, the quality of health services in turn is affected by education. Also, Learning by doing and learning in the educational process affect the cost structure of the health sector. Therefore, the main purpose of this article was to evaluate the learning intensity and scale economies in the health sector. To meet these ends, the data of 187 developed and developing countries for 2000-2018 and feasible generalized least square (FGLS) method was used. The results indicate that in the world and developed countries the return to scale was constant and the scale economies were exploited. Moreover, in these countries, the learning process is realized and learning intensity was higher than the global average. While in most developing countries the scale economies not to be exhausted. Hence, it is possible to exploit scale economies by increasing production. In these countries about learning intensity can not be decided definitively. Overall, the findings confirm that learning and scale economies realized in the health sector of world countries and in each time cumulative experience doubles, costs will decline to 28% of its previous level. So, both components played an effective role in reducing the average cost of this sector.