Access to medicines is an important health policy issue. This study analyses the demand for medicines in low-income countries from the perspective of the prices paid by public authorities. The analysis draws on World Health Organization (WHO) and Health Action International (HAI) 2006 data on...

This paper uses a difference-in-difference style estimation strategy to test separately the impact of competition from public sector and private sector hospitals on the efficiency of public hospitals. Our identification strategy takes advantage of the phased introduction of a recent set of...

This paper examines whether or not hospital competition in a market with fixed reimbursement prices can prompt improvements in clinical quality. In January 2006, the British Government introduced a major extension of their market-based reforms to the English National Health Service. From January...

The issue of health inequalities has steadily gained attention in South Korea, as income inequality widened and social polarization increased following the country’s economic crisis in the late 1990s. While official figures indicate a general trend of worsening mental health, with rapidly...

Generic competition in the pharmaceutical market is an effective cost-containment mechanism that improves static efficiency and stimulates pharmaceutical innovation. There is no prior study that has empirically analysed the relative delays in adoption of generic competition. This paper aims to...

This paper is concerned with a set of parametric estimators that attempt to provide consistent estimates of average medical care costs under conditions of censoring. The main finding is that incorporation of the inverse of the probability of an individual not being censored in the estimating...

This paper uses a difference-in-difference estimator to test whether the introduction of patient choice and hospital competition in the English NHS in January 2006 has prompted hospitals to become more efficient. Efficiency was measured using hospitals’ average length of stay (LOS) for...

The latest CEP Election Analysis, published jointly with LSE Health, gives an overview of the research evidence on UK healthcare, one of the key battlegrounds of the 2010 General Election.

Recent substantive reforms to the English National Health Service expanded patient choice and encouraged hospitals to compete within a market with fixed prices. This study investigates whether these reforms led to improvements in hospital quality. We use a difference-in-difference-style...