What is known as the Costa Rican approach in the area of public health ?

Concept

Development policy can use fiscal reallocation to fund public health: a country may eliminate an entire spending category, such as a standing military, and redirect the money that category would have consumed into social sectors like health and education, instead of merely rebalancing between existing budget heads.

Application

Costa Rica abolished its army in 1948 after its civil war, under President Jose Figueres Ferrer, and its 1949 constitution formally bars a standing military. Because no standing army exists to fund, the money a conventional military would otherwise consume is available for public health, education, and welfare spending instead. This specific mechanism, health spending expands because there is no army to fund, is exactly what is called the Costa Rican approach in public-health and development discussions.

Cross-check

• Equal spending on health and defence describes a deliberate fifty-fifty split between two budget lines. Costa Rica's policy is not a balancing exercise between two live budgets; it does not maintain a standing army or conventional military budget to balance health spending against.

• A defence budget larger than the health budget describes the reverse prioritisation. Costa Rica did not merely keep military spending below health spending, it did away with a standing army and conventional military spending altogether after 1948.

• Spending on the health of the armymen presumes a standing army whose personnel need funded healthcare. Costa Rica maintains no standing army, so no such army-health expenditure exists.