By Sarah Garcia
Conventional wisdom is that high income countries spend a higher percentage of GDP on healthcare than low income countries and therefore have better health outcomes, but data shows that this is not always the case. To compare healthcare spending between high income countries and low income countries we can look at healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP. Surprisingly, as can be seen in Figure 1, the percentage of a country’s GDP spent on healthcare does not directly correlate with their income classification.
Figure 1
When broken down by income status it can be seen that there is a large range of spending at each income level. For low income countries, spending ranges from 2.738% of GDP in South Sudan to 11.378% of GDP in Malawi (Figure 2). For lower middle income countries, spending ranges from 1.48% of GDP in Timor-Leste to 13.71% of GDP (Figure 3). For upper middle income countries, spending ranges from 2.07% of GDP in Turkmenistan to 17.14% of GDP in Marshall Islands (Figure 4). Finally, for high income countries spending ranges from 2.19% of GDP in Qatar to 17.14% of GDP in the United States (Figure 5).
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4
Figure 5
Figure 6
Figure 7
In conclusion, we can see that while it is true that high income countries have a higher life expectancy than low income countries (Figure 6), data shows no correlation between percentage of GDP spent on healthcare and life expectancy (Figure 7).
Sources:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2102rank.html
https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/906519