Get OECD health expenditure data

Downloads (and caches) total current health expenditure as a share of GDP for OECD member countries from the System of Health Accounts (SHA) database.

Usage

get_oecd_health(countries = "all", start_year = 1990, refresh = FALSE)

Arguments

countries

Character vector of ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country codes, or "all" for all available OECD members. Defaults to "all". Run list_oecd_countries() to see available codes.

start_year

Numeric. Earliest year to include. Defaults to 1990.

refresh

Logical. If TRUE, re-download even if a cached copy exists. Defaults to FALSE.

Value

A data frame with columns:

country

ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country code (character)

country_name

English country name (character)

year

Calendar year (integer)

series

"HEALTH_EXPENDITURE" (character)

value

Total health expenditure as a share of GDP (numeric)

unit

"% of GDP" (character)

Details

Health expenditure covers all spending on health care goods and services across all financing sources (government, compulsory insurance, voluntary insurance, and out-of-pocket payments), measured as a percentage of GDP at current prices.

See also

Other social indicators: get_oecd_education(), get_oecd_inequality()

Examples

# \donttest{
op <- options(readoecd.cache_dir = tempdir())
health <- try(get_oecd_health(c("AUS", "GBR", "USA"), start_year = 2000))
#> Downloading from OECD API...
if (!inherits(health, "try-error")) head(health)
#>    country country_name year             series value     unit
#> 59     AUS    Australia 2000 HEALTH_EXPENDITURE 7.574 % of GDP
#> 60     AUS    Australia 2001 HEALTH_EXPENDITURE 7.661 % of GDP
#> 55     AUS    Australia 2002 HEALTH_EXPENDITURE 7.859 % of GDP
#> 53     AUS    Australia 2003 HEALTH_EXPENDITURE 7.864 % of GDP
#> 54     AUS    Australia 2004 HEALTH_EXPENDITURE 8.070 % of GDP
#> 56     AUS    Australia 2005 HEALTH_EXPENDITURE 7.951 % of GDP
options(op)
# }