The role of education in health system performance

The production frontier is used here as a powerful tool to investigate the shape of the relationship between education and health; the study was prompted by a critical appraisal of the surprising logical consequences of the relationship as it was estimated by the WHO, namely that countries would do much better, health-wise, to withdraw any Dollar away from their health care systems and to put the [...] The composite outcome as it was in WHR00 has been heavily criticized on two justified grounds: most of the 191 countries couldn’t provide data on inequality of health, responsiveness or financing and the composite index was therefore imputed rather than measured, casting doubt on the significance of the efficiency scores of the majority of the health care systems; second, the same weights were use [...] A detailed account of the reasons for such a choice and the criticisms it has prompted is given in appendix 2. 3.1 The role of human capital on health in WHR00 and its unexpected consequences on public policy The main focus of this paper is on the relationship between health and the only factor controlled for in the WHO study, namely the average number of years of education of the adult population [...] The remaining of the paper builds upon the broad methodological frame and tries to improve the estimation of the relationship between education and health, investigating heterogeneity and the potential for diminishing returns. [...] The procedure is as follows: first, I split the population of 111 countries into two subsets, one comprised of countries with values for EDU (the average number of years of education in the population age 15 and over) below a threshold and one comprised of countries with values of the same variable above the threshold.