This paper explores the possibility that universal health coverage may inadvertently result in distorted labor market choices, with workers preferring informal employment over formal employment, leading to negative effects on investment and growth, as well as reduced protection against...

The authors examine the effects of the introduction of Vietnam's health insurance (VHI) program on health outcomes, health care utilization, and non-medical household consumption. The use of panel data collected before and after the insurance program's introduction allows them to eliminate any...

The authors propose a method for decomposing inequalities in the health sector into their causes, by coupling the concentration index with a regression framework. They also show how changes in inequality over time, and differences across countries, can be decomposed into the following: Changes...

There is extensive literature on hospital cost functions for industrial countries, but very little literature for developing countries. Yet the issues facing policy-makers in all countries are much the same: are hospitals overcapitalized, as is often claimed of U.S. hospitals? Are hospitals...

This paper takes a bibliometric tour of the past 40 years of health economics using bibliographic"metadata"from EconLit supplemented by citation data from Google Scholar and the authors'topical classifications. The authors report the growth of health economics (33,000 publications since 1969 --...

In the mid-2000s, India began rolling out large-scale, publicly-financed health insurance schemes mostly targeting the poor. This paper describes and analyzes Andhra Pradesh's Aarogyasri scheme, which covers against the costs of around 900 high-cost procedures delivered in secondary and tertiary...

This paper exploits the staggered rollout of Thailand’s universal health coverage scheme to estimate its impacts on whether individuals report themselves as being too ill to work. The statistical power comes from the fact that there is an average of 62,000 respondents in the labor force survey...

This paper exploits the staggered rollout of Vietnam’s hospital autonomization policy to estimate its impacts on several key health sector outcomes including hospital efficiency, use of hospital care, and out-of-pocket spending. The authors use six years of panel data covering all Vietnam’s...

Inefficiency is commonplace, yet exercises aimed at improving provider performance efforts to date to measure inefficiency and use it in benchmarking exercises have not been altogether satisfactory. This paper proposes a new approach that blends the themes of Data Envelopment Analysis and the...

This paper uses a common household survey instrument and a common set of imputation assumptions to estimate the pro-poorness of government health expenditure across 69 countries at all levels of income. On average, government health expenditure emerges as significantly pro-rich, but there is...