Does Health Care Utilisation Reduce Child Mortality? An ARDL Bounds Test Approach

The child mortality rate is an important indicator presenting crucial information about the health status of a country. In the current study, we examined whether health care utilisation reduced the under-5 mortality rates, an important health status indicator, in Turkey. We employed an autoregressive distributed lag bounds test. We used doctor consultation and health expenditure as the independent variables. We found out that both doctor consultation and health expenditure had negative impacts on the under-5 mortality rates in the short run; however, the effects of both variables were not statistically significant ( p > .05). Also, we showed that while the effect of doctor consultation on the under-5 mortality rates was negatively and statistically significant ( p < .05) in the long run, the effect of health expenditure was not statistically significant ( p > .05). Turkey should allocate more to health care services specifically targeting infant and child health to reduce its infant and child mortality rates.