This study examines the effects of social protection and social services on health outcomes in Ghana. It utilizes a macro level annual data set from 1990 to 2022 extracted from the World Development Indicators (WDI) and employs the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) estimation technique for the empirical analysis. The regression analyses provide evidence of long run equilibrium relationship between all the health outcome variables on one hand and social protection and social services on the other. The results for the outcome variables show that the one with the fastest return to its long run time path when there is deviation is adult mortality while life expectancy is measured to have the slowest recovery. The long run results show that social protection significantly affects all outcome variables except fertility rate while the availability of community health workers, literacy rate and safe water are also estimated to have significant effects on all outcome variables. Again the short run effects of social protection on health outcomes are found to be consistent with the long run effects. This study underlines the key roles of social protection and social services in achieving desired health outcomes in Ghana and recommends the strengthening of social protection policies in Ghana and an expansion of social services to the Ghanaian population in order to ensure that the populace lives more healthily. The study enriches the literature by integrating social protection and social services into health outcome functions and employing ARDL to isolate both long and short run relationships.
Anaman et al. (Tue,) studied this question.