Objectives: To undertake a review of the EU member states’ health care systems in relation to a framework of health-related variables, and to determine the position of the UK with respect to all other EU countries in the light of recent remarks by Tony Blair in arguing for the UK to move...

The European Union's common policies for market integration have also had an impact on the health care sectors. A panel of EU member states' data reveals that their health care expenditures exhibit β-convergence.

This paper overviews the EURONHEED (EUROpean Network of Health Economics Evaluation Databases) project. Launched in 2003, this project is funded by the EU. Its aim is to create a network of national and international databases dedicated to health economic evaluation of health services and...

Convergence analysis in economics has largely been confined to macro-indicators such as GDP income and applied within identifiable regions of the world or between developing and developed countries. This paper reports on the application of adapted methods within this discipline to the area of...

The English NHS has introduced a system of budgets for general practices covering hospital expenditure for the patients on their lists. We model individual expenditure using diagnostic information from previous hospital spells, plus a large set of attributed variables measuring population,...

We examine whether a hospitals quality is affected by the quality provided by other hospitals in the same market. We first set out a theoretical model with regulated prices which specifies conditions on demand and cost functions which determine whether a hospital will have higher quality when...