The Impact of Official Development Assistance and Health Aid on Health in Developing Countries

Foreign aid is one of the ways to increase health spending in developing and low-income countries to achieve the goals of global health care coverage. Accordingly, the main purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of official development assistance and health aids in developing countries.

This study is paid to study long-term relationship between health indicator, the share of official development assistance and health aids in GDP, per capita physician, income, education and urbanization, by using the statistical data of 25 developing countries (including Iran) during the period 1995-2017. For this purpose, the Dynamic Ordinary Least Square (DOLS) estimator is used. Also, the statistical analyzes were performed using the Eviews soft wares.

Based on the results of the model estimation, the share of health aids in GDP, per capita physician, income per capita, enrollment rates in secondary courses (education index) and urbanization rate; improve the health indicator in the long-term. One percent increase in the share of health aids in GDP, reduce the infant mortality rate (IMR) in developing countries by about 0.18 percent, in the long run. But share of official development aids to GDP has not a significant effect on the health index.

Proper use and management the health aid in developing countries can help improve health in these countries.