It is generally accepted that government health expenditures should disproportionately benefit the poor. And yet in most developing countries the opposite is the case. This paper examines the implications of a central assumption of benefit incidence analysis, namely that the unit cost of a...

Up to now catastrophic and impoverishing payments have been seen as two alternative approaches to measuring financial protection in health. Building on the previous literature, the authors propose a unified methodology in which impoverishing and catastrophic payments are mutually exclusive...

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...

The post-communist transition to social health insurance in many of the Central and Eastern European and Central Asian countries provides a unique opportunity to try to answer some of the unresolved issues in the debate over the relative merits of social health insurance and tax-financed health...

"While there is a great deal of anecdotal evidence on the economic effects of adverse health shocks, there is relatively little hard empirical evidence. The author builds on recent empirical work to explore in the context of postreform Vietnam two related issues: (1) how far household income and...