Abstract
This paper examines the issue of female political representation and the extent to which it effects government health spending as a share of GDP in states with varying income levels. First, the paper reviews and discusses the broad literature on determinants of government health spending and the literature related to gender and health spending, generally. Second, it tests whether female parliamentary representation can explain parts of the variation in government health spending across countries and over time. To do so, it uses country-level data and controls for known determinants of government health spending. The results show that increased female parliamentary representation is associated with higher government health spending. Moreover, this association remains significant even after controlling for other determinants of government health spending, indicating that that the effect may be partially causal. The results also indicate that if lowand middle-income countries increased their share of women in parliaments by 10 percentage points, government health spending as a portion of GDP would, on average, increase by between 10 and 12 percent. The corresponding figure for high-income countries is around 5 percent. Overall, the analysis suggests that the level of female representation in parliaments has significant effect on countries health spending.