Do health expenditures 'catch-up'? Evidence from OECD countries

In this paper, we examine the 'catch-up' hypothesis, that is, whether or not per capita health expenditures of the UK, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, and Spain converge to the per capita health expenditures of the USA over the period 1960-2000. We propose a framework to examine convergence of health expenditures and use recent developments in unit root testing, namely the Lagrange multiplier univariate and panel approaches that allow for at most two structural breaks. Our main finding is that while univariate and panel tests that do not incorporate structural breaks fail to find evidence of convergence, univariate and panel LM tests that allow for structural breaks find strong evidence of convergence of per capita health expenditures of the UK, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, and Spain to that of the USA. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.