POST-COVID SCENARIO: SOME ISSUES RELATED TO HEALTH EXPENDITURE AND URBANIZATION

The socio-economic crises which most of the countries of the world along with India are facing pose huge challenges before the governments and the common people in the affected regions of the world, raising many novel issues and imposing wrenching trade-offs. In this paper, we have tried to establish the correlation between state intervention in health infrastructure and recovery from pandemic-led crises. Our analysis of morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 reveals significant causal effect of urbanization on the degree of incidence of COVID-19 epidemic across the states in India, in particular, every one per cent rise in urbanization rate translates into over 9 per cent in morbidity from COVID-19 and over 10 per cent increase in mortality rate, on an average across the states. Moreover, it becomes evident from this study that per capita health spending, particularly by the State, is statistically significant for explaining the role of health spending as preemptive factor against pervasion of COVID-19, and it is a justified case only after having controlled the impact of urbanization.