Household Health Expenditure in Yanam Region, India

Investment on health has a direct, positive and significant influence on the economic growth of an economy. Secondly, research on Health Economics has a recent origin and whatever the works available on it are mainly on macro aspects. Little attention has been given to the micro aspects of it by the researchers, government, policy makers and development planners. In this context the present piece of work is an attempt to study the pattern of health expenditure as a component of income and consumption expenditure across different income groups; to examine the impact of income and education on household health expenditure (HHE); and to find out the gender bias in HHE in Yanam, India. The study is based on primary data collected from Yanam. Simple random sampling method is used to select the households. To substantiate the objectives descriptive statistics and multiple regression techniques are used. Income has significant influence on household health expenditure where as the impact of education is insignificant. Both male health expenditure and female health expenditure also have significant influence on household health expenditure but female has more influence on it than male.