Do political regime transitions in Africa Matter for Citizens’ Health Status

Africa’s quest to achieving improved health status and meeting the Millennium Development Goals targets cannot be effectively achieved without examining the quality of leadership, transitions and regimes and how they impact on the decisions and the policy effectiveness that bring about improved health and living standards of the citizenry. In this paper, we study the importance of regime transitions on government’s expenditure in health and on infant mortality, as a development indicator. A unique panel dataset comprising 44 sub-Saharan African countries spanning from 1970 t0 2010 containing information on political regime and leaders was used for the study. To account for the relevance of leader characteristics in regime transitions in our study we control for leader fixed-effects. The overall results are suggestive of a democratic advantage in the process of achieving effective health policy outcomes for promoting health, and hence the wellbeing of the citizens in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa in the long run. Keywords: Africa, health policy, public health, private health, child mortality, democracy, autocracy, political leaders. JEL Codes: I15, H51, O55