Abstract:
Health resources are an important factor to reduce infant and child
mortality. However, taking into account budget constraints, it is very difficult to
increase public health resources for all regions within a country at the same time.
For this reason, in this paper, we assess the effects of the regional health govern-
ment expenditure assignment as well as the regional health resources available
such as beds or paediatricians. We estimate a dynamic model using a system-GMM
(Generalised Method of Moments) to explain infant and child-mortality in
Kazakhstan during the period 2000–2018. In this period, Kazakhstan experiences a
sharp decrease in infant and child mortality reaching the target values from sus-
tainable development goals (SDG). We evaluate several variables to capture the
effects of public health resources assignment, such as expenditure per capita,
expenditure depending on previous year mortality rates as well as health facilities
resources for children by region. Results show that an increase in health expendi-
ture per capita in those regions with high mortality levels is particularly relevant to
reduce infant mortality while health facilities are actually more important to reduce
an under-5 mortality rate.
