A comparative study of IMF bailouts on African recipient country health systems

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is heavily criticized for being one of the major contributors to the causes of the Ebola outbreak in Africa. This study examined whether public health spending in Ebola affected Sub-Saharan African countries (SSACs) were more likely to decrease compared to non-Ebola affected countries due to IMF bailout program participation. A regression model and its robustness were used to analyse SSACs data from 1994 to 2014. The empirical findings of this study show that IMF bailout can significantly increase the health expenditure of non-Ebola-affected SSACs. But we obtained a significantly negative relationship between health spending and IMF program participation for Ebola-affected SSACs. The study has implications for the methodological design of studies addressing this debatable issue and health spending policy in SSACs.