Impacts of Economic Freedom, Health, and Social Expenditures on Well-Being Measured by the Better Life Index in OECD Countries

ABSTRACT

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has developed the Better Life Index (BLI), which is a multidimensional approach to well-being. This study aims to investigate the impact of health and social expenditures as well as the economic freedom index on well-being measured by BLI among 34 OECD countries for 2013–2017 period. We estimated panel models to observe the social and health expenditure effects according to their sources and the overall impact of economic changes among countries. We find that public and private social expenditures have a positive and statistically significant impact on BLI at 1% significance level. Additionally, whereas public health expenditure has a positive and statistically significant impact on BLI at 1% significance level, the effects of private health expenditure are statistically significant at 10% significance level. The economic freedom index has a positive and statistically significant impact on BLI in both models. Both social and health expenditures should take a prominent position in policy debates for a better life.

KEYWORDS:

• Well-being
• health expenditure
• social expenditure
• OECD countries
• better life index
• economic freedom index

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Additional information

Funding

The research did not receive any specific grants from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.