A method for decomposing inequalities in the health sector into their causes is developed and applied to data on child malnutrition in Vietnam.Wagstaff, van Doorslaer, and Watanabe propose a method for decomposing inequalities in the health sector into their causes, by coupling the concentration...

The authors propose a method for decomposing inequalities in the health sector into their causes, by coupling the concentration index with a regression framework. They also show how changes in inequality over time, and differences across countries, can be decomposed into the following: Changes...

Egalitarian concepts of fairness in health care payments (requiring that payments be linked to ability to pay) are compared with minimum standards approaches (requiring that payments not exceed a prescribed share of prepayment income or not drive households into poverty). The arguments and...

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...

This paper exploits the staggered rollout of Vietnam's hospital autonomization policy to estimate its impacts on several key health sector outcomes including hospital efficiency, use of hospital care, and out-of-pocket spending. The authors use six years of panel data covering all Vietnam's...