The authors examine the design and limitations of incentives for health care providers to serve in rural areas in developing countries. Governments face two problems: it is costly to compensate well-trained urban physicians enough to relocate to rural areas, and it is difficult to ensure quality...

An important source of failure in markets and justification for government intervention in the health sector of LDCs is imperfect information. Pharmaceutical use is one area in which widespread problems have been noted with substantial misuse, improper diagnosis and problems of compliance noted...

Despite interesting work on infectious diseases by such economists as Peter Francis, Michael Kremer, and Tomas Philipson, the literature does not set out the general structure of externalities involved in the prevention, and care of such diseases. The authors identify two kinds of externality....

The author applies to the health sector an approach to analyzing projects advocated in a recent paper by Devarajan, Squire, and Suthiwart-Narueput. In the health sector, a project evaluation should: 1) Establish a firm justification for public involvement. The author identifies a number of...

As governments grow richer, the share of their GDP devoted to public spending rises. Public spending in the United States was 7.5 percent of GDP in 1913. It is 33 percent today. Although industrial countries spend twice as much as developing countries, government spending on goods and services...

The authors report on a study in which unannounced visits were made to health clinics in Bangladesh with the intention of discovering what fraction of medical professionals were present at their assigned post. This survey represents the first attempt to quantify the extent of the problem on a...

The authors examine how governments finance and allocate public spending, with an eye to developing strategies for pricing publicly provided health services. They also examine the implications of current policy and the possibility for rationalizing competing government priorities. Because...

The author tries to derive price and rationing rules for public health facilities. He highlights the effect on these rules of different assumptions about the objectives of government (health versus welfare), the limits of available policy instruments, and the market environment in which the...

This paper reviews the correlations and potential links between health and economic growth and summarizes the evidence on the role of government in improving health status. At the macroeconomic level, the evidence of an impact of health on growth remains ambiguous due both to difficulties in...

The author examines public economics rationales for public intervention in health insurance markets, draws on the literature of organizational design to examine alternative intervention strategies, and considers health insurance reforms in four Latin American countries -- Argentina, Brazil,...