Health care indicators in Turkey and their econometric relationality and interaction with macro economic indicators

The neoliberal transformation period that has been proceeding in Turkey since the early 1980s inevitably affected and restructured the very making of social policy and related schemes, the health care sector being the most-predominantly influenced one, by means of devising a new macro-economic setting and processes. In such a context, attempts to dismantle realign and restructure health care sectors along with neoliberal prerequisites in both in Turkish setting and other international settings as well, have intensified.Along with the default-on going neoliberal transformation process, approaches in health care economics have experienced paradigmatic changes within its theoretical aspects. In conjuncture characterized as the new phase of international capitalism labeled as `globalization?, health care economics approaches have substituted its traditional understanding of health as a part of human capital, thereby integrating its theoretical aspects to the macroeconomic model with a new paradigm based on neoliberal understanding , handling health care within the micro economic modeling of health care expenditures and efficiency and effectiveness of such expenditures coupled with organizational effectiveness of health care institutions. Given the mental map above, it will be logically infeasible to think of neoliberal restructuring, dismantlement and retrenchment processes apart from the macroeconomic transformation experienced in Turkey.The study shall identify and locate the econometric relationality between health indicators as a byproduct of policies in implementation and macroeconomic policies led by hegemonic neoliberal transformation process. The work will be inclusive of four parts. The first and second parts of the study will harvest basic concepts of health care economics coupled with the historical development of the discipline, which will be followed with analysis of basic characteristics of health care markets and `health care demand? and `health care supply? in such markets.The third section of the study will locate basic factors and actors involved and indulged in the Turkish health care policy making and Turkish health care supply and finance schemes. In addition to the structural analysis, the work shall present findings on the relation between health indicators and macroeconomic performance indicators with the aid of descriptive statistics with definitions of health care indicators given in the concerning section. Outlining the basic streams in the section, the final part of the work will test major health care indicators and economic growth; and fundamental public expenditures of health, defense and education by means of Granger Causality test, VAR Analysis and Composition and Impulse and Response Analysis. A second empirical part of the final section will encompass a structural break test, CUSUM squares test among, public, private and total health care expenditures. The very last empirical procedure will test the health care expenditures `sensitivity to income among health care expenditures, national income and annual population growth rate with cointegration analyses.Keywords: Healthcare and economic indicators, health care expenditures, Turkish Health Care Sector, Granger causality test, VAR Analysis and Decompositiom, Impulse and Response Analysis, CUSUM structural break test, Johansen cointegration test ; Income Sensitivity of Health Care Expenditures