BACKGROUND: Family planning services are amongst the most highly utilized services in the National Health Service. There have, however, been few empirical studies of the costeffectiveness of these services. METHODS: Two measures of output were used to calculate the cost-effectiveness of family...

The size of national health care expenditure is an important research and policy issue. This paper reviews theoretical and empirical analyses of an implied optimal size for a health sector. Various economic theories are explicitly or implicitly invoked, but none is fully satisfactory. Theory...