Introduction

Once you have cleaned and filtered your dataset – it’s time for analysis. . Analysing data helps us to learn what our data might mean and helps us to extract answers to our questions from the dataset.

Look at the data we imported. (In case you didn’t finish the previous tutorial, don’t worry. You can copy a sample spreadsheet here).

This is World Bank data containing GDP, population, health expenditure and life expectancy for the years 2000-2011. Take a moment to have a look at the data. It’s pretty interesting – what could it tell us?

Here are some ideas we came up with:

1. How much (in USD) is spent on healthcare in total in each country?
2. How much (in USD) is spent per capita in each country?
3. In which country is the most spent per person? In which country is the least spent? What is the average for each continent? For the world?
4. What is the relationship between public and private health expenditure in each country? Where do citizens spend more (private expenditure)? Where does the state spend more (public expenditure)?
5. Is there a relationship between expenditure on healthcare and average life expectancy?
6. Does it make any difference if the expenditure is public or private?

NOTE: With these last two questions, you have to be really careful. Even if you find a connection, it doesn’t necessarily mean that one caused the other! For example: imagine there was a sudden outbreak of the plague; it’s not always fatal, but many people who contract it will die. Public healthcare expenditure might go up. Life expectancy drops right down. That doesn’t mean that your healthcare system has suddenly become less efficient! You always have to be REALLY careful about the conclusions you draw from this kind of data… but it can still be interesting to calculate the figures.

There are many more questions that could be answered using this data. Many of them relate closely to current policy debates. For example, if my country were debating its healthcare spending right now, I could use this data to explore how spending in my country has changed over time, and begin to understand how my country compares to others.