A comparative analysis on healthcare spending efficiency among the g-8 countries and Turkey

Abstract

Recently, there has been a remarkable increase in the number of people coming to Turkey from high-income countries to benefit from the healthcare system. This increasing demand for Turkish healthcare-related services has led us to compare the efficiency of the country's healthcare spending to highly industrialized countries. Specifically, COVID-19 has indicated the important of every country reaching healthcare efficiency. The efficiency of healthcare expenditure facilitates reaching maximum healthcare outcomes with minimum healthcare inputs. This paper evaluates the cross-country healthcare spending efficiency ranking across the countries of the Group of Eight (G8) and Turkey between 2000 and 2018. We measured the efficiency values of healthcare spending using the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). We also evaluated the fluctuations in healthcare spending of the studied countries on a yearly basis via the Malmquist Index. The findings indicate that Turkey has been the most technically efficient across all years. Turkey managed the optimal use of its inputs by an average increase of 1.7% on the Technical Efficiency Exchange (TEC) value. Furthermore, the results reveal that Turkey follows Italy in total productivity growth in healthcare expenditures. Turkey has managed to increase its success in reaching an efficient production line much more than other countries during the research period. The sustainability of these improvements depends on Turkey's development of the capacity and realization to benefit from healthcare technology