HEALTH ECONOMY: A STUDY ON THE RELATIONSHIP OF WATER AND SANITARY WATER SERVICES IN THE COSTS OF PUBLIC HEALTH IN THE NORTHEAST REGION OF BRAZIL

Sa？etak Health services are characterized as meritorious goods, a type of semipublic good that, given its social character, the allocation of resources in these activities becomes socially desirable by the government so that they are allocated efficiently. One of the ways to control and reduce unnecessary health expenditures is the population's access to basic sanitation services that, when inefficient, cause negative externalities to the exposed population. In this sense, the objective of this study is to analyze the relationship between coverage of basic sanitation services and the costs of hospital admissions for waterborne diseases in the Northeast Region of Brazil, from 2005 to 2015. In order to do so, we used secondary data from the Department of Informatics of the Brazilian Unified Health System (DATASUS), the National Household Sample Survey (PNAD) and Finance of Brazil (FINBRA) for the construction of panel regression models with fixed effects. The main results indicate that access to sanitation services, mainly from the sewage collection network, reduces the costs of hospitalizations for Diseases Related to Inadequate Environmental Sanitation (DRSAI) of the Unified Health System (SUS)