The White Paper Our Health, Our Care, Our Say noted concerns about geographical equity of access to GPs (Department of Health, 2006, page 63), listed the 30 PCTs with the lowest number of GPs per head of need adjusted population, and set out policy initiatives to attract additional providers of...

In 2003 a new type of provider organisation, the Foundation Trust (FT), was introduced in England, and the best performing NHS hospitals were able to apply for 'Foundation status'. FTs enjoy greater financial flexibility and are subject to less central monitoring and control. The phased...

The main objective of this article is to evaluate to which extent the set of national and regional cost control policies implemented in recent years in Italy have affected hospital activity. Our contribution is mainly empirical as we focus our attention on the impact that policies like hospital...

We analyse - theoretically and empirically - the effect of hospital mergers on waiting times in healthcare markets where prices are fixed. Using a spatial modelling framework where patients choose provider based on travelling distance and waiting times, we show that the effect is theoretically...

The aim of the paper is to present new evidence on the relationship between income and health expenditure allowing for (i) substitution and complementary relationships between private and public health expenditure, (ii) presence of structural breaks in the dependent variables, and (iii) presence...