Abstract
Economic growth appears to be associated with the development of more resources in health and medical care. In this thesis, we applied Heckman Two-Stage and Two-Stage Tobit model to investigate the factors influencing household health expenditure via the health production model. We specifically focused on the relationship between the medical resources with household medical expenditure for each county in Taiwan. Our empirical results showed that medical manpower had significantly positive effects on household expenditure of western medical outpatient and of western medicine. Moreover, the medical equipment and premises had significantly positive effects on total expenditure of healthcare and of claiming health insurance payments. On top of that, the numbers of pharmacies had the most significantly positive effects on all four health expenditure measures. As for the government budget of medical care, we found that it had significant but inconclusive effects on various health expenditures. In sum, our finding cannot lead to a robust conclusion regarding to the effect of medical resources on household health expenditure.