The impact of education on healthcare expenditure in China: quantity or quality

ABSTRACT

With respects to the low level of the healthcare expenditure, China has been experiencing a rapid growth of the education. This article is designed to test the education quantity and the education quality on the healthcare expenditure and conducts China’s provincial data set over the period 2001–2016. The results suggest that the education quantity has no significant effect on the healthcare expenditure, while the education quality has a positive and significant effect. Thus, it is suggested that China’s expansion on education cannot maintain the quality, and is not conducive to the improvement of human capital in education and health.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• quantity
• quality
• health care expenditure

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I12
• I20

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Youth Foundation of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Ministry of Education in China [grant number 15YJCZH139] and the Major Program from the Key Research Base of the Ministry of Education in China [grant number 17JJD790021].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ In order to keep the statistical coincidence, the data set excludes the data from Tibet, Hongkong, Maco, and Taiwan.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Youth Foundation of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Ministry of Education in China [grant number 15YJCZH139] and the Major Program from the Key Research Base of the Ministry of Education in China [grant number 17JJD790021]