Title: A cluster analysis and time series approach to examine the healthcare expenditure convergence among Taiwan and the OECD countries

Authors: David Han-Min Wang, Tiffany Hui-Kuang Yu

Addresses: Department of Accounting, Feng Chia University, 100 Wenhwa Road, Taichung, Taiwan 40724, ROC. ' Department of Public Finance, Feng Chia University, 100 Wenhwa Road, Taichung, Taiwan 40724, ROC

Abstract: The Healthcare Expenditure (HCE) in Taiwan and the OECD countries have significantly increased over the recent years. To shed light on the issue of the upward trend of HCEs, this paper performs convergence tests and cluster analysis on HCEs in Taiwan and the OECD countries. The results support the overall and pairwise conditional convergence hypotheses. The cluster analysis shows that most countries are converging towards three different health system models.

Keywords: healthcare expenditure; HCE; cluster analysis; convergence hypothesis; time series; expenditure convergence; Taiwan; OECD; health system models.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBHR.2008.018453

International Journal of Behavioural and Healthcare Research, 2008 Vol.1 No.1, pp.61 - 69

Published online: 24 May 2008 *

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