Democracy does improve health
dc.contributor.author | Oyèkọ́lá , O | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2022-10-19T09:11:58Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2023-01-18 | |
dc.date.updated | 2022-10-18T22:53:43Z | |
dc.description.abstract | In this paper, we study the extent to which the spread of democracy affects country-level health outcomes in 115 countries, between 1960 and 2015. To do this, we use both the level and change measures of democracy in our regressions, concentrating on within-country variations. Our finding is that a one standard deviation increase of 0.35 in the level of democracy is associated with a 0.11 standard deviation increase in life expectancy, even after accounting for various country and time features. This corresponds to an increase in life expectancy of around 5 years for a country initially, with a mean life expectancy of 54 years. However, we do not find the change measure of democracy to be consistently influential. These results are robust to employing alternative model specifications, to using different subsamples of the data, and to alternative estimation techniques. We also find that these critical effects are retained when using other measures of health status. In particular, we observe that as the level of democracy rises, each of infant mortality, child mortality, and crude death decreases. We, therefore, conclude that the material role of democratic institutions in fostering population health is of first-order relevance. | en_GB |
dc.identifier.citation | Published online 18 January 2023 | en_GB |
dc.identifier.doi | 10.1007/s11205-022-03027-z | |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10871/131322 | |
dc.identifier | ORCID: 0000-0003-2984-7144 (Oyekola, Olayinka) | |
dc.language.iso | en | en_GB |
dc.publisher | Springer | en_GB |
dc.rights | © The Author(s) 2023. Open access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ | |
dc.subject | Democracy | en_GB |
dc.subject | Political regimes | en_GB |
dc.subject | Life expectancy | en_GB |
dc.subject | Infant and child mortality | en_GB |
dc.subject | Crude death | en_GB |
dc.subject | Panel data analysis | en_GB |
dc.subject | Fixed effects | en_GB |
dc.subject | Instrumental variables | en_GB |
dc.subject | GMM | en_GB |
dc.title | Democracy does improve health | en_GB |
dc.type | Article | en_GB |
dc.date.available | 2022-10-19T09:11:58Z | |
dc.identifier.issn | 0303-8300 | |
dc.description | This is the final version. Available on open access from Springer via the DOI in this record | en_GB |
dc.identifier.eissn | 1573-0921 | |
dc.identifier.journal | Social Indicators Research | en_GB |
dc.relation.ispartof | Social Indicators Research | |
dc.rights.uri | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ | en_GB |
dcterms.dateAccepted | 2022-10-18 | |
dcterms.dateSubmitted | 2021-07-13 | |
rioxxterms.version | VoR | en_GB |
rioxxterms.licenseref.startdate | 2022-10-18 | |
rioxxterms.type | Journal Article/Review | en_GB |
refterms.dateFCD | 2022-10-18T22:53:45Z | |
refterms.versionFCD | AM | |
refterms.dateFOA | 2023-02-22T15:44:11Z | |
refterms.panel | C | en_GB |
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's licence is described as © The Author(s) 2023. Open access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/