Health Expenditure, Population Ageing and Income in Vietnam: Evidence from an ARDL Approach

Abstract

This study empirically examines the long-run and short-run impacts of population ageing and income on health expenditure in Vietnam during the 1990 – 2017 period by using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach. We provide evidence that there are stable effects of population ageing and income on health expenditure in the short and long run. However, the impact of population ageing is stronger than that of income on health expenditure. In addition, health care is a necessity in both of the short and long run in Vietnam. Results imply urgent policies needed to deal with the rising pressure on health financing due to the fast growth of population ageing in the country.