Health financing and household financial protection in Democratic Republic of the Congo: an econometric analysis

Abstract

This manuscript examines the health expenditures of economic agents in the Democratic Republic of Congo (households, Government, and their external technical and financial partners). The low level of income hinders access to appropriate health care given the high costs of health care in the DRC. As a result, the government and its various technical and financial partners must intervene in the health sector to ensure that vulnerable households are protected from ruinous expenses. At the same time, it provides an overview of public finances in the health sector in the DRC using a theoretical approach, and analyzes the effects of Government intervention and of its external technical and financial partners using a vector auto regression (VAR) model, through simulations of random shocks and variance decomposition. This analysis is carried out assuming the constancy of the socio-economic environment "all other things being equal". The result is that the per capita household health expenditure forecasts can be significantly improved at the 0.05 threshold by the per capita public health expenditure and by the per capita health expenditure forecasts of the Government external technical and financial partners.