a seriesCurrent health expenditure per person

What a country spends on health in a year, divided by its population, in current US dollars. The World Bank republishes it from the WHO Global Health Expenditure Database. It is the series behind this site's first world map, and 193 countries carry a value.

The number is assembled from national health accounts, which countries compile to a shared WHO framework and submit on their own schedule. That is why the most recent year differs by country: some report within eighteen months, some are four years behind. Every value on this site carries its own year for that reason.

Inference — the series is also the reason a price comparison needs a second column. A country can be cheap to be operated in because its wages are low, because its state absorbs the capital cost of the hospital, because its currency fell, or because the operation billed is a smaller thing than the one billed at home. Spending per person separates none of those out. It is a scale, not an explanation.

Fetched by tools/harvest_worldbank.py from the World Bank indicator API, no key, most recent non-null year kept per country, the year stored beside the value. Aggregates — the Bank's own regions and income groups — are dropped, because their iso2 codes are not country codes.

Current US dollars, not adjusted for what a dollar buys locally. A purchasing-power version exists and tells a different story; this site does not carry it yet. Country counts on this page were re-read on 17 September 2026, after the harvest started dropping the World Bank's own aggregates — income groups, regions, the euro area — which arrive on the same endpoint wearing two-letter codes. One of them, XN, is "Lower middle income" at the Bank and northern Cyprus on this site's map.