It one of six component of governance indicator as stipulated by the World Bank. It reflects perceptions of the extent to which a country's citizens are able to participate in selecting their government, as well as freedom of expression, freedom of association, and a free media. The standardized value for VA lies between +2.5 and -2.5. The +2.5 indicates the situation where there is no obstacle to expressing voice and -2.5 is the situation where people have no way of expressing their voices. The value ‘0’ is the average value of VA.
Published in Chapter:
Depression Rate, GDP Growth Rate, Health Expenditure, and Voice and Accountability: Are There Co-Movements?
Ramesh Chandra Das (Vidyasagar University, India) and Amit Chatterjee (MIT World Peace University, India)
Copyright: © 2020
|Pages: 21
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-2329-2.ch007
Abstract
Existing studies on mental disorder reveal that, besides biological factors, major socioeconomic factors are responsible behind the ever-increasing prevalence of the part of population suffering from mental depression. The present study investigates whether depression rate has long run co-movements with growth of per capita GDP, health expenditure, and voice and accountability of the citizens for individuals as well as panels of four countries, USA, China, India, and Bangladesh, for the period 1995 to 2016. Using cointegration, error correction, and causality testing, the study observes that individual countries do not produce acceptable and robust results, but the panel data results produce long run relations among the four endogenous variables. The Wald test results show that all the two lagged values of depression rate, growth rate, health expenditure and voice and accountability are causing depression in the current period.