Smoking and obesity are two leading causes of preventable death. Further understanding of the relationship between these two risk factors can assist in reducing avoidable morbidity and mortality. This study investigates the empirical association between obesity and the propensity to smoke and to...

Attempts to test the relative deprivation hypothesis, that income inequality affects individual health, are subject to the aggregation problem. Waldmann (Quarterly Journal of Economics 107, 1992) ingeniously attempts to overcome the difficulty by using income data for the poor and the share of...

The paper makes use of data envelopment analysis (DEA) to measure the cost and production efficiency of local government programmemes for childhood immunization in urban and rural settings in Australia. Model specification is tested for validity, methods are used for ranking efficient units and...

Data Envelopment Analysis is a potentially useful technique for measuring production efficiency and is being increasingly applied to health care services, as with other areas. However, some fundamental concerns need to be addressed before Data Envelopment Analysis can be accepted widely as a...

It has been proposed that cross-country comparisons of the technical efficiency of health production, estimated using data envelopment analysis (DEA), have useful applications for policy makers. In theory such an analysis utilizes measures of the socioeconomic determinants of health relevant to...