Empirical specification of healthcare resource distribution based on the law of competitor distribution

Sustainable development relies on the efficient resource distribution among economic agents, requiring an integrated approach. A key principle of this concept is reducing inequality through more equitable resource distribution. This study examines the distribution of healthcare resources across countries amid rising intercountry disparities. The proposed hypothesis suggests that healthcare resource allocation follows a non-random pattern shaped by competitive dynamics. Using the law of competitor distribution, this paper models intercountry resource distribution through the “generalized theory of competition” to analyze rank-size dependencies. The World Bank and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development data on health statistics were used as the initial dataset for constructing the rank-size dependencies of the of resource distribution. The findings indicate that the empirical distribution of healthcare resources deviates from the Pareto distribution law, reflecting the stochastic multiplicative nature of competition. When the empirical distribution was compared with the Pareto distribution, an uneven distribution of resources in the competition process was revealed. Further, the power law poorly approximated the size of the empirical distributions at both low and high ranks. To reduce inequality in the distribution of healthcare resources, the study advocates for an integrated development approach leveraging digital technologies.