Beschreibung:
It remains unclear whether governments can improve health outcomes by solely increasing public spending on health care. In this paper, we provide first causal evidence on the impact of an increase in public spending on primary care on health care-seeking and mortality. We employ an event study difference-in-differences design that covers 5,443 Brazilian municipalities over 11 years. We exploit the staggered introduction of a national programme called PMAQ that increased public spending on primary care by 6% in participating municipalities. Results suggest that increased public spending by municipalities did not translate into better health on average, with coefficients precisely estimated around zero. Corruption or the spending increase being too small do not explain our null finding. We do however find evidence for the role of local-level development as increases in public spending only reduce mortality in wealthy municipalities