Comparative dynamics of public health spending: Re-conceptualizing delta-convergence to examine OECD and Latin America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Theoretical interest in the effects of globalization and regionalization on national outcomes, coupled with the unprecedented availability of comparable, cross-national data, creates an expanded opportunity for social scientists to test propositions of convergence over time. In this article, we investigate trends and convergence in public health spending in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) compared with Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Public health expenditures represent an important indicator of social protections, especially for the most vulnerable and the poor. In order to assess patterns in public health convergence in the region, we introduce an innovative conceptualization of delta-convergence. While this term has referred to countries’ convergence toward an exemplar or an abstract ideal, we retool delta-convergence to examine how countries move toward or away from a regional mean, which is itself allowed to vary over time. We find an upwards trend in public health spending as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) in both Latin America and the OECD, and while in OECD there is little evidence of convergence or divergence, our results indicate a period of convergence followed by divergence in Latin America. Our analysis further reveals important regional dynamics at play, and engages with world polity and world systems theory and the literatures on regionalization versus globalization. We conclude by discussing the utility of using delta-convergence analysis to identify group trends, outliers, and country-specific trajectories.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".