This is the first paper to investigate the determinants of the demand for medical care in the People?s Republic of China. It uses a data set that consists of detailed characteristics of urban households, a continuous measure of health care spending, and price. A two-part model and a discrete...

We examine whether China's remarkable reduction in income poverty has been accompanied by comparable progress in health. Our findings are fourfold: (a) province-level rates of improvement in life expectancy were higher in the 1990s than in the 1970s and the 1980s, and were lowest in the 1980s....