Spatial and Temporal Differences in the Health Expenditure Efficiency of China: Reflections Based on the Background of the COVID-19 Pandemic

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought several challenges to China's national health services, causing great risks and uncertainties to people's lives. Considering China's huge population and relatively small medical investment and its good performance in the COVID-19 pandemic, this research utilizes the hybrid meta-frontier model to analyze health expenditure efficiencies of 30 provinces in China from 1999 to 2018 and compares spatial and temporal differences of the efficiencies in regards to regional forward position and national common frontier. The results show an obvious difference in health expenditure efficiency in different provinces along the regional frontier, in which the efficiency gap in the eastern region is the largest. Moreover, the room for improvement in health expenditure efficiency varies from region to region. For the national common frontier, Beijing is the most efficient, while Guizhou is the least. The eastern region owns the most efficient technical level of health expenditure efficiency, and there is a large efficiency distance between it and the western region. The findings offer effective guidance for elevating the expenditure structure and spatial resource allocation of public health and for promoting the equalization of high quality basic medical services.