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.
Machine summary:
"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.
In the meantime, determining the effective factors such as economic, social, and environmental conditions on increasing the life expectancy as the community's health output, followed by identifying the effective factors on technical efficiency of this production process, can be very useful for the policymakers of this type of countries.
Based upon this, the present study attempts to identify the effective factors such as economic, social, and environmental on the technical inefficiency of health production function by employing the method of Battese and Coelli Brief description of them can be found in Worthington (2004).
Following Battese and Coelli (1995) u it ′s can be represented as: = + (3) where is the vector of explanatory variables influential on the technical inefficiency of the health production function over time, and is the vector of unknown parameters to be estimated and ′ are the random variables defined by the truncation of the normal distribution with zero mean and variance, 2 , such that the point of truncation is − , i.
The maximum-likelihood estimates for the both parameters in the health production function and technical inefficiency model for the countries involved, associated with t-statistic relating to each of these parameters are presented in table 2(These results were obtained using the computer program FRONTIER Version 4."