Cost-effectiveness analysis is versatile and used widely to assist in health care decision making. This chapter discusses how cost-effectiveness analysis is used at the system or national level, particularly in the domain of coverage and payment policy. We describe its relationship to other...

Prices in government and employer-sponsored health insurance markets only partially reflect insurers' expected costs of coverage for different enrollees. This can create inefficient distortions when consumers self-select into plans. We develop a simple model to study this problem and estimate it...

We study optimal public health care rationing and private sector price responses. Consumers differ in their wealth and illness severity (defined as treatment cost). Due to a limited budget, some consumers must be rationed. Rationed consumers may purchase from a monopolistic private market. We...

We consider allocation problemswith indivisible goods when preferences are single-peaked. In this paper we identify the family of efficient, non-manipulable, consistent, and balanced solutions. We refer those solutions as Temporary Satisfaction Methods, that can be viewed as extensions to the...

Alcohol policies have significant potential to curb alcohol-related harms, improve health, increase productivity, reduce crime and violence, and cut government expenditure. The WHO Global Strategy to reduce the harmful use of alcohol provides a menu of policy options based on international...

Three main approaches can be used to assess infrastructure performance. The first employs macro-econometric techniques to estimate the impact of the existing infrastructure capital stock on growth and to infer its growth-maximising level. This approach neglects the impact of infrastructure on...

Despite the economic importance of the road transport sector, there is no systematic cross-country evidence on the sector’s efficiency. This paper develops a conceptual framework for analysing the social efficiency of the road transport sector, including non-market inputs – such as travel...

Die Verhandlungen zur Fortschreibung des Kyoto-Protokolls in Durban Ende 2011 haben gezeigt, dass kurz- bis mittelfristig mit keinem verbindlichen und ambitionierten globalen Abkommen zur Treibhausgasreduktion zu rechnen ist. Vor diesem Hintergrund gewinnt die klimapolitische Strategie der...

n agents located along a river generate residues that then require cleaning to return the river to its natural state, which entails some cost. We propose several rules to distribute the total pollutant-cleaning cost among all the agents. We provide axiomatic characterizations using properties...

China is well-placed to avoid the so-called “middle-income trap” and to continue to converge towards the more advanced economies, even though growth is likely to slow from near double-digit rates in the first decade of this millennium to around 7% at the 2020 horizon. However, in order to...