| Summary: | According to the World Health Organization (WHO), government plays a crucial role in providing quality life for its
citizens through good health system. There has been less attention given in analysing the relationship between government
expenditure, governance and health outcomes particularly in developing countries. This paper aims to study the impact
of public health expenditure and governance on health outcomes in Malaysia. An Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL)
cointegration framework has been used to analyse data from 1984 to 2009. The results based on the bounds testing
procedure show that a stable, long-run relationship exists between health outcomes and their determinants; namely
income level, public health expenditure, corruption and government stability. The results also reveal that public health
expenditure and corruption affect long- and short run health outcomes in Malaysia. The findings are important to the
policy makers in making decisions to improve the citizens’ quality of life. We suggest the Ministry of Health of Malaysia
to conduct more consultations with other ministries and other stakeholders in health services as to identify the needs
and emphasize on the importance of health program to the society. At the same time, attention should be given to reduce
or eliminate the corruption rate as it has adverse effects on the country.
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