Welfare is a rather vague term whose meaning depends on ideology, values and judgments. Material resources are just means to enhance people’s well-being, but growth of the Gross Domestic Production is still the standard measure of the success of a society. Fortunately, recent advances in...

We evaluate how the productive structure and level of specialization of a hospital affect technical efficiency by analyzing a six-year panel database (2000/2005) drawn from hospital discharge records and Ministry of Health data. We adopt a distance function approach, while measuring the...

Economic regulation by independent regulatory authorities is justified in a legal sense by theories based on delegation, (partial) ministerial responsibility and judicial review, or more recently on regulatory contracts and stakeholder representation. While none of these models is fully...

This paper analyses whether 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 outpatient health care...

Background: Thailand achieved universal health coverage (UHC) in 2002 by introducing a tax-financed health insurance scheme, the UHC scheme, to approximately 47 million of Thais. With the comprehensive benefit package and clear objectives in ensuring equitable access to essential health care,...

Excessive alcohol consumption among young people is a major public health concern. On March 1, 2010, the German state of Baden-Württemberg banned the sale of alcoholic beverages between 10pm and 5am at off-premise outlets (e.g., gas stations, kiosks, supermarkets). We use rich monthly...

Prince Edward Island faces a $13 billion fiscal burden – the future tax bill for increased healthcare costs over the next half-century – and should prepare now for the coming demographic squeeze, says a report today from the C.D. Howe Institute. In “Managing the Cost of Healthcare for an...

Nova Scotia faces a $89 billion fiscal burden – the future tax bill for increased healthcare costs over the next half-century – and should prepare now for the coming demographic squeeze, says a report released today from the C.D. Howe Institute. In “Delivering Healthcare to an Aging...

This document analyzes the structure of the health care system in Colombia with the aim of establishing the magnitude of the public fiscal deficit generated by such a system. We first explain its complex funding structure (full of “cross-subsidies”) and then we run simulations to establish...

This paper uses an unusual administrative dataset covering the universe of French hospitals to consider hospital employment: this is consistently higher in public hospitals than in Not-For-Profit (NFP) or private hospitals, even controlling for a number of measures of hospital output. NFP...