The United States has state of the art technology and world renowned expertise in medical treatment, yet in terms of healthcare it shows a dramatically poor performance in relation to the other industrialized countries. This situation is surprising, since one would expect that a free market...

The same methodology Oecd and Ecofin apply to project future trends of health care expenditue is here applied to reconstruct backwards Italian health care expenditure. The time horizon is 1988-2012. Results are described and argued. Important evidence emerges on the historical value of the...

Health expenditure in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has improved over the years with several recent efforts to improve resource commitments to the health sector. Health outcomes in the region have, however, seen little improvements over the years. Several reasons, including the efficiency of health...

Ecofin and Oecd methodology is used to reconstruct the historical evolution of public current health care expenditure for Italy and Lazio (an Italian Region). The reconstructed evolutions allow to detect what have been the per-capita expenditures per age brackets in absolute values (Euro) in...

This paper presents and evaluates pharmaceutical policies in the EU aimed at the rational use of medicines and at keeping pharmaceutical spending under control. Policy makers are growing more aware that by regulating pharmaceutical markets correctly, considerable savings can be achieved without...

The efficiency of Turkish health system, which was restructured by the health transformation framework, depends on the mutual compliance of both health service providers and demanders. The future and success of the new health system may be determined by solving problems that were generated from...

The Ecofin-Oecd methodology is applied to reconstruct the health care expenditure evolution in Italy and in the Region Emilia Romagna. The reconstructed series can be compared to the historical series, highlighting the different capabilities of the Italian average and of the Region Emilia...

This paper describes the reasons at the basis of the insufficiency of pay-as-you-go systems to provide resources for financing health care in an ageing society with the low rates of growth that will characterise western industrialised economies during next decades. Intuitive arguments are...

Health care has to make transitions to be truly effective in the modern world. A change in paradigm is needed. This requires that value - defined as the health outcome for a particular medical condition per unit of cost expended - must be applied and added to health care, and health care itself...

This paper presents the first empirical assessment of the causal relationship between social capital and health in Italy. The analysis draws on the 2000 wave of the Multipurpose Survey on Household conducted by the Italian Institute of Statistics on a representative sample of the population (n =...