Public Health Efficiency and Country Competitiveness: Empirical Study in Pre-Pandemic and Pandemic Periods
Public Health Efficiency and Country Competitiveness: Empirical Study in Pre-Pandemic and Pandemic Periods

Summary/Abstract: Dramatical fall in economic growth both in terms of COVID-19 pandemic and military threats actualizes the need to identify the drivers and inhibitors of ensuring the country competitiveness. Instead, in the conditions of intense load on the public health system caused by both the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and military threats, the defi- nition of these drivers and inhibitors among public health factors is of critical im- portance. The purpose of this study is to identify the impact of public health factors on the level of the country's competitiveness, as well as the change of these causal patterns in the context of the unfolding of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). For the empirical implementation of the research goal, several hypotheses have been formed: hypothesis 1 – improving the efficiency of the public health system has a positive effect on the coun- try's competitiveness (both in pre-pandemic and pandemic periods); hypothesis 2 – in the context of the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an increase in the sig- nificance of the influence of public health factors on the level of the country's competi- tiveness. The study involves the implementation of several stages: 1) formation of an in- tegral index of the country's competitiveness; 2) modelling the impact of public health factors on the level of the country's competitiveness in the pre-pandemic and pandemic periods. Modelling of the influence of public health factors on the level of the country's competitiveness was carried out using panel data regression modelling and the Hausman test in the Stata/SE 14.2 soware. The implementation of the theoretical part of the study proved the existence of five contextual clusters of scientific research on ensuring the country's competitiveness in the context of the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. The results of the practical approbation of the developed approach made it possible to par- tially confirm hypothesis 1 (among the factors characterizing the effectiveness of the pub- lic health system, only the birth rate, mortality rate, life expectancy, and number of hos- pital beds had a statistically significant impact on the country's competitiveness, while neither current nor capital expenditures on health care did not have a significant impact) and to confirm hypothesis 2 (in the context of the unfolding of the pandemic, the influ- ence of relevant public health factors on the country's competitiveness increased).

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