Achieving universal health coverage, including financial risk protection and access to quality essential health-care services, is one of the main Sustainable Development Goals. In low-income countries, innovative and affordable health financing systems are key to realize these goals. This paper...

Demands for ramping up health expenditures are at an all-time high. Countries' needs for additional health resources include responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, closing gaps in achieving the Sustainable Development Goal in health in most emerging and developing countries, and serving an ageing...

The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and...

We review Greek public sector healthcare policies and health-related outcomes since 2010.We find that excess spending was successfully curtailed, elements of the institutional framework were modernized, and health outcomes have been relatively favorable. However, especially prior to Covid-19,...

Public health spending is low in emerging and developing economies relative to advanced economies and health outputs and outcomes need to be substantially improved. Simply increasing public expenditure in the health sector, however, may not significantly affect health outcomes if the efficiency...

We estimate the additional health spending necessary to treat COVID-19 patients. We expand a Susceptible Infected Recovered model to project the number of people requiring hospitalization, use information about healthcare costs by country, and make assumptions about capacity constraints in the...

High and rapidly rising health care costs in the United States and growing ranks of uninsured persons have brought health care reform to the top of the U.S. Administration’s policy agenda. This paper describes the health care financing system in the United States, highlights what are viewed as...

Dutch disease is often referred as a situation in which large and sustained foreign currency inflows lead to a contraction of the tradable sector by giving rise to a real appreciation of the home currency. This paper documents that this syndrome has been witnessed by many emerging markets and...