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...

Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) are now routinely collected in the English National Health Service (NHS) and used to compare and reward hospital performance within a high-powered pay-for-performance scheme. However, PROMs are prone to missing data. For example, hospitals often fail to...

A study by health economists at the University of York has, for the first time, produced an estimate of the impact on other NHS patients of new and more costly drugs and other treatments. This research suggests a refinement of the way the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence...

Healthcare systems in low- and middle-income countries face considerable population healthcare needs with markedly fewer resources than those in higher income countries. The way in which available resources are allocated across competing priorities has a profound effect on how much health is...