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Examining the relationship between human resources and mortality: the effects of methodological choices

  • Original Article
  • Published:
International Journal of Public Health

Abstract

Objectives

Relationship between human resources for health and mortality remains inconclusive despite numerous studies published on the topic in the last decades. This paper investigates how and why methodological trade-offs implicitly made by researchers when using macro-data can in part explains this puzzling lack of agreement.

Methods

Using data from the Global Health Observatory, we build a model of the relationship between human resources and mortality, which we progressively alter by changing its scope, variables and analysis period. Then, we compare results among themselves to isolate the impact of methodological choices from other changes in the data.

Results

Results demonstrate how methodological choices linked to (1) the analysis period, (2) the definition of health inputs, health outcomes and control variables and (3) the choice of specific variables as proxy for human resources and health outcomes affects the relationship between human resources and health outputs.

Conclusions

Results presented highlights the need for complementing existing macro-analysis with other analytical strategies, for better documenting methodological choices in research studies, as well as for further supporting countries’ efforts to produce reliable and consistent data.

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Notes

  1. Health production functions from the health provider’s perspective. A completely different literature is related to health production from the individuals/consumers/patients’ perspective, based on Grossman’s (1972, 2000) human capital model.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the 2015 class of “Concepts and Methods in Global health” at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, led by Till Bärnighausen and Barry Bloom for their constructive feedback throughout the class, as well as Chris Wheelahan, and two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, 677 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA, 02115, USA

    Pablo Villalobos Dintrans & Claire Chaumont

Authors
  1. Pablo Villalobos Dintrans
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  2. Claire Chaumont
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Correspondence to Claire Chaumont.

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No funding was received for this study.

This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors. No ethical approval was obtained for this study, as it uses publically available data.

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Villalobos Dintrans, P., Chaumont, C. Examining the relationship between human resources and mortality: the effects of methodological choices. Int J Public Health 62, 361–370 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00038-016-0935-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00038-016-0935-4

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