Introduction: One of the most important challenges in health systems is to determine the quantity of resources a country devotes to medical care. The share of the health expenditures of GDP in developed countries is often more than developing countries, therefore as the level of development increases health expenditures increase too.
Methods: This paper examines the stationary and co- integration of health expenditure and GDP based on the panel co-integration analysis, for a sample of 13 MENA countries using data for the period 1995-2005.
Results: Unit root and trend stationary results indicate that both health expenditure and GDP are non- stationary. Even though, the findings indicate that health expenditure and GDP are cointegrated.
Conclusion: The fraction of expenditure devoted to health care of total GDP decreases with GDP. This implies that health care is not a luxury good in MENA countries.
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