In December 2002, the Commission released the proceedings of its August 2002 workshop on Managed Competition. The workshop was organised to provide an opportunity for a more detailed discussion by a group of leading health policy analysts of the proposal by Dr Richard Scotton of a ‘managed...

Proceedings of a conference organised by the Productivity Commission and the Melbourne Institute of Economic and Social Research held on 7-8 March 2002 to explore key policy issues facing Australia's health sector. The Roundtable drew together thirty leading practitioners and analysts on health...

The goal of this paper is to identify key issues concerning the nature of competition in health care markets and its impacts on quality and social welfare and to identify pertinent findings from the theoretical and empirical literature on this topic. The theoretical literature in economics on...

Performance targets are commonly used in the public sector, despite their well known problems when organisations have multiple objectives and performance is difficult to measure. It is possible that such targets may work where there is considerable consensus that performance needs to be...

In many health care systems primary care physicians act as ‘gatekeepers’ to secondary care. We investigates the impact of the UK fundholding scheme under which general practices could elect to hold a budget to meet the costs of elective surgery for their patients. We use a differences in...

We examine the effect of publicly provided health care on welfare by combining local level data on public health care, and individual level data on life satisfaction. It is shown that relatively high expenditures in health care have a positive effect on individuals' life satisfaction in our...

HIV/AIDS is a pandemic with serious implications for South Africa in general, and the South African construction industry in particular. It is the single largest cause of death in South Africa. Against a backdrop of an acute shortage of housing and infrastructure provision, the prevalence of...

In Switzerland, there are substantial cantonal differences in per capita cost of the mandatory health care system. The present paper breaks these differences down into price and quantity effects revealing both, a large quantity and a somewhat smaller price variance across cantons. As a...

This paper analyzes Singapore’s multi-pronged approach to managing prolonged low fertility which has led to population aging, labor force shortages, increasing elderly dependency ratios, and feminization of the elderly population. This approach has emphasized high growth, and has given...

Norwegian government policy is to increase the supply of psychiatric services to children and young persons, both by increasing the number of personnel and by increasing productivity in the psychiatric outpatient clinics (BUP). Increased accessibility to services is observed for the last years,...