Transformations  in
Business & Economics

IS THE QUALITY OF PUBLIC GOVERNANCE BENEFICIAL FOR THE EUROPEAN UNION HEALTH SYSTEMS? THE MEDIATING ROLE OF HEALTH FINANCING⁶
Alexandra-Madalina Taran, Gratiela-Georgiana Noja, Marilen-Gabriel Pirtea

ABSTRACT: This paper delves into the fundamentals of public governance, health financing and individual well-being at the level of the European Union. We used moderated mediation to capture the conditional indirect effects of health financing and developed two top-down approaches to study the impact of good governance on health status. The first approach has assessed the effects of quality public governance credentials on health status conditions. The second approach aimed to capture the most suitable way to enhance better health of EU citizens through good governance and the mediating effects of financing levels. Structural equation modelling and robust regression with Huber and biweight iterations are employed in this study as advanced econometric procedures applied to a dataset comprising the EU-27 countries during the 2010-2021 lapse of time. Main findings evidence that improving public governance and health financing leads to better health outcomes for EU citizens.

KEYWORDS:  public governance, health system, health expenditures, well-being, structural equation modeling

JEL classification:  H51, H75, I15.

⁶Acknowledgments:  This work was supported by a grant from the Romanian Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalization, the project with the title "Economics and Policy Options for Climate Change Risk and Global Environmental Governance” (CF 193/28.11.2022, Funding Contract no. 760078/23.05.2023), within Romania's National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) - Pillar III, Component C9, Investment I8 (PNRR/2022/C9/MCID/I8) - Development of a program to attract highly specialised human resources from abroad in research, development and innovation activities.