An Analysis of Effective Factors on the Technical Efficiency of Health Production in the OIC Countries

Abstract

The importance of community's health followed by the consideration of endogenous growth models has led to an increase in health expenditure of countries to speed up economic growth and development. This has made the efficiency of health production function to an essential issue especially in developing countries. Based upon this, the present study with employing the stochastic frontier analysis method looks for identifying the main determinants such as economic ( children immunization and age dependency ratio ) , environmental ( the rule of law ) and social ( globalization ) conditions on technical inefficiency of health production function between member countries of Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in the period of 1998-2007. The empirical results show increasing the efficiency of health production through improvement in economic and environmental condition. But the increase in socialization globalization such as social factor has led to a decrease in technical efficiency that may be due to the lack of appropriate culture of using new technologies and modern social relations affected by the process of globalization in such countries. Â Â Â Â JEL Classification: C12 C23 I12 I19 Â Â