LAUSR

Disability not only encounters people with disabilities with physical, intellectual, and sensory limitations but also it imposes remarkable costs on families and governments to provide the needed supports (1-4). According to the World report on disability, 15 % of the world population are living with a kind of disability. Of these, the results of the world health survey indicate that 2.2% (110 million people) experience remarkable difficulties in functioning (5). The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) compromises 36 members (28 European countries, 4 American countries, 2 Asian countries, and 2 Australia/Oceania countries) with different socio-economic levels. In 2015, OECD countries spent 8.8% of their GDP on healthcare, that is around 0.7% higher compared to 2000 (6). The findings indicate that healthcare spending has outpaced economic growth over the past decades due to rapid advances in medical technologies, assistive devices, population aging, and raising awareness. To date, various studies have been done to estimate disability costs in different countries. For example, in Australia, the total economic costs of Intellectual disabilities (ID) were estimated to be around $14,720 billion annually (7). Ghatneker et al. in 2004, estimated the direct cost of stroke around $56,024 in Sweden (8). In Germany, total costs for a 4th year following stroke were almost 3 billion Euros. GDP is a determinant factor in predicting healthcare spending in countries. But the pressure on public budgets to devote more funding to healthcare systems has been an outstanding policy concern in OECD countries over the past three decades (9). Thus, some countries like Sweden adopted cost-containment strategies associated with structural changes to control the accelerated growth in healthcare spending so that they started to reducing the size of health settings and the decreasing the number of healthcare professionals in 2000 (10). Since different factors may contribute to Governments’ health spending, this study aimed to investigate the factors that can predict public spending on disabilities in OECD countries The study was a secondary analysis of existing data. In this study, we used the OECD health database to analyze the relationship between GDP and public spending on disabilities. The latest OECD Data from 2013 to 2015 were applied in this research. Regarding the OECD database, we used five indicators of Public Spending on Incapacity (PSI) as the outcome variable, GDP (US dollars/capita), health spending (US dollars/capita), public social spending (US dollars/capita), Gross direct insurance premiums (US dollars/capita), and Disability prevalence (age >15). To investigate the situation of countries at the same time, we used the available data from 2013 to 2015 as well. Two Linear regression models performed to estimate the effects of explanatory variables on public spending on in-