Public expenditure with education and healthcare in EU countries

This analysis aims to show, for EU countries, the level of the public expenditure for education and healthcare, as well as the relations between these expenditure, considered as input, and several social indicators as output. The comparison shows, on the one hand, the rather large differences between the EU countries for all analysed indicators. Usually, the most developed countries allocate the largest resources for these areas and have the best performance, but the relations are not very strong though. Furthermore, it is often shown that the values of the output social indicators are not congruent with those of the public expenditure, as other factors of influence interfere, such as those related to system management, the behaviour of the population, from the interest for school and performance, when we speak of education, to the lifestyle and feeding habits, when speaking about the health state. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.