Associate Professor Mehdi Ammi, jointly with political scientists Olivier Jacques and Alain Noël from Université de Montréal and health services researcher Emmanuelle Arpin from the University of Toronto, recently published a peer-reviewed article titled “The political and fiscal determinants of public health and curative care expenditures: evidence from the Canadian provinces, 1980–2018” in the Canadian Journal Public Health.
Public health, that is the promotion, protection and surveillance of health as well as the prevention of diseases, is a long term investment with limited immediate benefit. As such, expenditures on public health may be particularly vulnerable to government cuts. This paper finds that in Canada, fiscal austerity reduces expenditures on public health, but it does the same for curative care expenditures. A factor that appears to crowd-out expenditures on public health is past expenditures on curative care. However, this crowding-out may be minimized by left governments: left governments spend more on public health after controlling for past curative expenditures. More on this study findings in the paper!