The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the evolution of health care expenditure in Spain during the period 1980-1997, and henceforth to comment on the cost containment measures put forward to control its growth. The paper is divided into three separate sections. The first offers...

The principal aim of this paper is to estimate a stochastic frontier cost function and an inefficiency effects model in the analysis of the primary health care services purchased by the public authority and supplied by 180 providers in 1996 in Catalonia. The evidence from our sample does not...

Many governments in developing countries implement programs that aim to address nutrional failures in early childhood, yet evidence on the effectiveness of these interventions is scant. This paper evaluates the impact of a conditional food supplementation program on child mortality in Ecuador....

This paper provides empirical evidence on the explanatory factors affecting introductory prices of new pharmaceuticals in a heavily regulated and highly subsidized market. We collect a data set consisting of all new chemical entities launched in Spain between 1997 and 2005, and model launching...

In this paper we study the disability transition probabilities (as well as the mortality probabilities) due to concurrent factors to age such as income, gender and education. Although it is well known that ageing and socioeconomic status influence the probability of causing functional disorders,...

This paper analyses whether or not tax subsidies to private medical insurance are self-financing by means of a structural approach. We construct a simulation routine based on a microeconometric discrete choice model that allows us to evaluate the impact of premium changes on the utilisation of...

Broadly speaking, pharmaceutical policy in Spain has been unable to control either the price or the volume of drugs prescribed. Limited attempts have been made to bring together the regulation of the pharmaceutical market and policies, in pursuit of the desired goals of efficiency and quality....

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the evolution of health care expenditure in Spain during the period 1980-1997, and henceforth to comment on the cost containment measures put forward to control its growth. The paper is divided into three separate sections. The first offers...

The aim of this paper is to assess whether cost-containment has been affected by recent pharmaceutical reimbursement reforms that have been introduced in the Spanish health care system over the period 1996-2002, under the conservative Popular Party government. Four main reimbursement policies...

In this paper we address the importance of distributive effects in the social valuation of QALY's. We propose a social welfare function that generalises the functions traditionally used in the health economic literature. The novelty is that, depending on the individual health gains, our function...