New Zealand, like most other developed economies, has struggled to establish the best way of organising and delivering publicly financed health care services. Before the 1990s, hospitals and some related services were planned and provided by regionally based, locally elected health boards. This...

Granger causality is tested for to examine the exogeneity of GDP which is assumed in previous research on the determinants of aggregate health care spending. In theory, the causal relationship between these variables could be in either or both directions. For some of the 20 OECD countries tested...

This paper critiques 'needs assessment' as a basis for allocating public funding of health and disability services and discusses an alternative economics-based approach. In essence, the former approach ignores the effects on health outcomes of health care spending at the margin while the latter...