The value of the social sciences is increasingly recognised in health services and clinical research, contributing to an increasing number of multi-disciplinary, multi-method studies. Such studies offer numerous advantages, but also pose particular challenges, including different approaches to...

Illness is a major risk to people's livelihoods in resource-poor settings, particularly where there are rising levels of chronic illness. Measures that improve access to treatment are increasingly seen as a vital form of social protection for vulnerable households, and central to the achievement...

Health insurance is an alternative to direct out-of-pocket (OOP) financing. It aims to improve access to care and reduce direct OOP payments. However, this may not be the case if there is high cost sharing and limited cover. This paper uses the methodology of propensity score matching to...

Health economics is increasingly recognized as a discipline that has much to offer developing countries in addressing these problems, but how can it help? What economic concepts and tools can be applied to the health sector? A wider understanding of the discipline is required if it is to support...

This paper identifies a large gap between the unusally implicit assumptions about non-market working relationships that underpin health care policy and evidence on non-market behaviour in practice. It then draws a series of conclusions for policy.

This paper presents a South African case study as a contribution to international debates about the policy challenges posed by health sector commercialisation. It shows that the South African health system was highly commercialised before 1994, and fragmented between the private sector, serving...