Summary (English)

Health care expenditures in industrial countries have been growing rapidly over the past forty years. This rapid growth jeopardizes the sustainability of public budgets and causes an increasing interest in the determinants of health care expenditures. In the literature many factors are proposed as possible drivers of health care expenditures. The first purpose of this paper is to give an up to date overview of the literature on health care expenditures. From this we conclude that income, ageing and some institutional variables are important in explaining health care expenditures growth.
Secondly, this paper tries to contribute to the existing literature by investigating the impact of several factors on health care expenditures in an empirical analysis using an error-correction model. Additional to the common factors that are proposed in the literature, we pay attention to a somewhat neglected driving factor, which is the increase in the relative price of health care compared to other goods and services.