Eddy Van Doorslaer, Adam Wagstaff, Magnus Lindelow, Eddy Van Doorslaer, Adam Wagstaff, Magnus Lindelow
This volume is a product of the staff of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank. The fi ndings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this volume do not...
Causes of Inequality in Health: Who You Are? Where You Live? Or Who Your Parents Were? (2007)
Adam Wagstaff, Pierella Paci, Heather Joshi
The participation of Joshi and Paci was partly supported by ESRC Grant no. L12851012 in the
Causes of Inequality in Health: Who You Are? Where You Live? Or Who Your Parents Were? (2007)
Adam Wagstaff, Pierella Paci, Heather Joshi
The participation of Joshi and Paci was partly supported by ESRC Grant no. L12851012 in the
Adam Wagstaff, Eddy Van Doorslaer
We are grateful to Naoko Watanabe for help on work leading up to this paper, and to participants at a seminar at the World Bank for helpful comments on earlier related work. The findings,...
Without wishing to incriminate them in any way, I am grateful to Deon Filmer, Maureen Lewis, and Martin Ravallion for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The findings, interpretations and...
Inequality Aversion, Health Inequalities, and Health Achievement (2007)
Without wishing to incriminate them in any way, I am grateful to Eddy van Doorslaer, and two anonymous referees for comments on an earlier version of this paper. The findings, interpretations, and...
The literature contains very few impact evaluations of health sector reforms, especially those involving broad and simultaneous changes on both the demand and supply sides of the sector. This paper...
Inequalities in Health in Developing Countries: Swimming Against the Tide (2001)
Without wishing to incriminate them in any way, I should like to thank Rohini Pande and Abdo Yazbeck for allowing me to cite data from their India study, to Abbas Bhuiya for providing me with...
Adam Wagstaff, Bob Baulch, Paul Glewwe, Richard Meyers
Pierella Paci, and to participants at seminars at Johns Hopkins, the World Bank in Hanoi, and the World Bank in Washington for helpful discussions on the issues covered in this paper. The findings,...
The findings, interpretations and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the...
Hospital cost functions for developing countries
Wagstaff, Adam, Barnum, Howard
There is extensive literature on hospital cost functions for industrial countries, but very little literature for developing countries. Yet the issues facing policy-makers in all countries are much...
Inequality aversion, health inequalities, and health achievement
The author addresses two issues. First, how can health inequalities be measured so as to take into account policymakers'attitudes toward inequality? The Gini coefficient and the related concentration...
The economic consequences of health shocks
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...
It is acknowledged that the lack of any systematic link between growth and income inequality does not necessarily mean that economic growth is not accompanied by major changes in the underlying...
Child Health: Reaching the Poor
Wagstaff, Adam, Bustreo, Flavia, Bryce, Jennifer, Claeson, Mariam
In most countries, rates of mortality and malnutrition among children continue to decline, but large inequalities between poor and better-off children exist, both between and within countries. These...
Some regression-based indicators of hospital performance
The development of performance indicators for the NHS has resulted in renewed interest in regression-based measures of hospital performance. This paper considers three regression-based measures of...
Econometric studies in health economics: a survey of the British literature
This paper provides a survey of British applied econometric work in the field of health economics. The literature is divided into five main areas: the supply of health care; the demand for health...
Measuring technical efficiency in the National Health Service: a stochastic frontier analysis
This paper reports the results of an investigation into the technical efficiency (i.e. the ability to convert inputs into outputs) the NHS hospital sector. The method employed is the ‘stochastic...
Health Service Delivery in China: A Literature Review
Eggleston, Karen, Ling, Li, Qingyue, Meng, Lindelow, Magnus, Wagstaff, Adam
The authors report the results of a review of the Chinese-language and English-language literatures on service delivery in China, asking how well China's health care providers perform, what...
Chapter 34 Equity in health care finance and delivery
Wagstaff, Adam, Van Doorslaer, Eddy, A. J. Culyer, J. P. Newhouse
The paper surveys the economics literature on equity in health care financing and delivery. The focus is, for the most part, on empirical work, especially that involving international and temporal...
Child Health: Reaching the Poor
Wagstaff, Adam, Bustreo, Flavia, Bryce, Jennifer, Claeson, Mariam
In most countries, rates of mortality and malnutrition among children continue to decline, but large inequalities between poor and better-off children exist, both between and within countries. These...
Health insurance for the poor : initial impacts of Vietnam's health care fund for the poor
Vietnam's Health Care Fund for the Poor (HCFP) uses government revenues to finance health care for the poor, ethnic minorities living in selected mountainous provinces designated as difficult, and...
Wagstaff, Adam, Lindelow, Magnus, Gao Jun, Xu Ling, Qian Juncheng
In 2003, after over 20 years of minimal health insurance coverage in rural areas, China launched a heavily subsidized voluntary health insurance program for rural residents. The authors use program...
Reflections on and alternatives to WHO's fairness of financial contribution index
In its 2000 World Health Report (WHR), the World Health Organization argues that a key dimension of a health system's performance is the fairness of its financing system. This paper provides a...
What difference does the choice of SES make in health inequality measurement?
This note explores the implications for measuring socioeconomic inequality in health of choosing one measure of SES rather than another. Three points emerge. First, whilst similar rankings in the two...
Catastrophe and impoverishment in paying for health care: with applications to Vietnam 1993-1998
Adam Wagstaff, Eddy Van Doorslaer
This paper presents and compares two threshold approaches to measuring the fairness of health care payments, one requiring that payments do not exceed a pre-specified proportion of pre-payment...
Adam Wagstaff, Eddy Van Doorslaer
This paper outlines a framework for comparing empirically overall health inequality and socioeconomic health inequality. The framework, which is developed for both individual-level data and grouped...
When the health sector variable whose inequality is being investigated is binary, the minimum and maximum possible values of the concentration index are equal to µ−1 and 1−µ, respectively,...
Inequality decomposition and geographic targeting with applications to China and Vietnam
How far are income-related inequalities in the health sector due to gaps between poor and less poor areas, rather than due to differences between poor and less poor people within areas? This note...
Social health insurance reexamined
Social health insurance (SHI) is enjoying something of a revival in parts of the developing world. Many countries that have in the past relied largely on tax finance (and out-of-pocketpayments) have...
Wagstaff, Adam, Moreno-Serra, Rodrigo
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...
Measuring financial protection in health
Health systems are not just about improving health: good ones also ensure that people are protected from the financial consequences of receiving medical care. Anecdotal evidence suggests health...
Socioeconomic inequalities in child malnutrition in the developing world
Wagstaff, Adam, Watanabe, Naoko
Among the conclusions the authors reach about malnutrition rates, among different economic groups: 1) inequalities in malnutrition almost disfavor the poor; 2) it's not just that the poor have higher...
In its latest World Health Report, The World Health Organization (WHO) argues that a key dimension of a health system's performance is the fairness of its financing system. The report discusses how...
Wagstaff, Adam, Van Doorslaer, Eddy, Watanabe, Naoko
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 changesin...
Wagstaff, Adam, Doorslaer, Eddy Van
The authors compare egalitarian concepts of fairness in health care payments (requiring that payments be linked to ability to pay) and minimum standards approaches (requiring that payments not exceed...
Inequalities in health in developing countries - swimming against the tide?
Inequalities in health have recently started to receive a good deal of attention in the developing world. But how large are they? An how large are the differences across countries? Recent data from a...
Poverty and survival prospects of Vietnamese children under Doi Moi
Wagstaff, Adam, Nga Nguyet Nguyen
By international standards, and given its relatively low per capita income, Vietnam has achieved substantial reductions in, and low levels of, infant and under-five mortality. The authors review...
Health facility surveys : an introduction
Lindelow, Magnus, Wagstaff, Adam
Health facility surveys come in various guises. One dimension in which they vary is their motivation. Some seek to understand better links between households and providers. Others seek to understand...
Health insurance impacts on health and nonmedical consumption in a developing country
Wagstaff, Adam, Pradhan, Menno
The authors examine the effects of the introduction of Vietnam's health insurance (VHI) program on health outcomes, health care utilization, and non-medical household consumption. The use of panel...
Health shocks in China : are the poor and uninsured less protected ?
Lindelow, Magnus, Wagstaff, Adam
Health shocks have been shown to have important economic consequences in industrial countries. Less is known about how health shocks affect income, consumption, labor market outcomes, and medical...
Can insurance increase financial risk ? The curious case of health insurance in China
Wagstaff, Adam, Lindelow, Magnus
The most basic argument for insurance is that it reduces financial risk. But since insurance opens up new opportunities for consuming expensive high-technology care which permits health improvements...
The literature contains few impact evaluations of health sector reforms, especially those involving broad and simultaneous changes on both the demand and supply sides of the sector. This paper...
Health systems in East Asia : what can developing countrieslearn from Japan and the Asian tigers ?
The health systems of Japan and the Asian Tigers--Hong Kong (China), the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan (China)--and the recent reforms to them provide many potentially valuable lessons to...
Need, equity and equality in health and health care
Four distributional principles for the allocation of health care resources are discussed: equal expenditures per capita, proportionality to need, proportionality to endowment health status, and...
QALYs versus HYEs - a theoretical exposition
There has been a vigorous dispute about quality adjusted life years (QALYs) and it has been argued that they are an inappropriate measure of patient utility and that a more efficient approach is to...
Wagstaff, Adam, Van Doorslaer, Eddy, Van Der Burg, Hattem, Calonge, Samuel, Christiansen, Terkel, Citoni, Guido, ...
Measuring Union Power in British Manufacturing: A Latent Variable Approach.
Paci, Pierella, Wagstaff, Adam, Holl, Peter
Empirical work on the effects of trade union power on economic variables such as wages, employment, productivity, and technological and organizational change has been severely hampered by the...
Measuring technical efficiency in the National Health Service: a stochastic frontier analysis
This paper reports the results of an investigation into the technical efficiency (i.e. the ability to convert inputs into outputs) the NHS hospital sector. The method employed is the ‘stochastic...
Econometric studies in health economics: a survey of the British literature
This paper provides a survey of British applied econometric work in the field of health economics. The literature is divided into five main areas: the supply of health care; the demand for health...
Some regression-based indicators of hospital performance
The development of performance indicators for the NHS has resulted in renewed interest in regression-based measures of hospital performance. This paper considers three regression-based measures of...
Need, equity and equality in health and health care
Four distributional principles for the allocation of health care resources are discussed: equal expenditures per capita, proportionality to need, proportionality to endowment health status, and...
QALYs versus HYEs - a theoretical exposition
There has been a vigorous dispute about quality adjusted life years (QALYs) and it has been argued that they are an inappropriate measure of patient utility and that a more efficient approach is to...
Health service delivery in China: a literature review
Karen Eggleston, Li Ling, Meng Qingyue, Magnus Lindelow, Adam Wagstaff
We report the results of a review of the Chinese- and English-language literatures on service delivery in China, asking how well China's health-care providers perform and what determines their...
Progressivity in the financing of decentralized government health programs: a decomposition
Adam Wagstaff, Magnus Lindelow
In many countries health services and|or health insurance are delivered but also partly financed by subnational entities that vary in their fiscal or financial capacity, e.g. local governments and...
Measuring technical efficiency in the National Health Service: a stochastic frontier analysis
This paper reports the results of an investigation into the technical efficiency (i.e. the ability to convert inputs into outputs) the NHS hospital sector. The method employed is the ‘stochastic...
Health systems in East Asia: what can developing countries learn from Japan and the Asian Tigers?
The health systems of Japan and the Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan), and the recent reforms to them, provide many potentially valuable lessons to East Asia's developing...
Equity in the delivery of health care in Europe and the US
Van Doorslaer, Eddy, Wagstaff, Adam, Van Der Burg, Hattem, Christiansen, Terkel, De Graeve, Diana, Duchesne, Inge, ...
Equity in the finance of health care: some further international comparisons1
Wagstaff, Adam, Van Doorslaer, Eddy, Van Der Burg, Hattem, Calonge, Samuel, Christiansen, Terkel, Citoni, Guido, ...
The redistributive effect of health care finance in twelve OECD countries
Van Doorslaer, Eddy, Wagstaff, Adam, Van Der Burg, Hattem, Christiansen, Terkel, Citoni, Guido, Di Biase, Rita, ...
Income-related inequalities in health: some international comparisons
Van Doorslaer, Eddy, Wagstaff, Adam, Bleichrodt, Han, Calonge, Samuel, Gerdtham, Ulf-G., Gerfin, Michael, ...
What Makes the Personal Income Tax Progressive? A Comparative Analysis for Fifteen OECD Countries
Adam Wagstaff, Eddy Van Doorslaer
In this paper, we explore the roles of tax credits, rate structures, allowances and deductions in determining the overall progressivity of net income tax liabilities in fifteen OECD countries. Three...
Can insurance increase financial risk?: The curious case of health insurance in China
Wagstaff, Adam, Lindelow, Magnus
We analyze the effect of insurance on the probability of an individual incurring [`]high' annual health expenses using data from three household surveys. All come from China, a country where...
Fungibility and the Impact of Development Assistance: Evidence from Vietnam's Health Sector
How can the impact of aid be estimated in the presence of fungibility? And how far does fungibility reduce its benefits? These questions are analyzed in a context where a donor wants to target its...
Social Health Insurance vs. Tax-Financed Health Systems--Evidence from the OECD
This paper exploits the transitions between tax-financed health care and social health insurance in the OECD countries over the period 1960-2006 to assess the effects of adopting social health...
Wagstaff, Adam, Lindelow, Magnus, Jun, Gao, Ling, Xu, Juncheng, Qian
In 2003, China launched a heavily subsidized voluntary health insurance program for rural residents. We combine differences-in-differences with matching methods to obtain impact estimates, using data...
Correcting the concentration index: A comment
In a recent article in this journal, Erreygers [Erreygers, G., 2008. Correcting the concentration index. Journal of Health Economics] has proposed a new measure of income-related health inequality to...
Wagstaff, Adam, Moreno-Serra, Rodrigo
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...
Poverty and health sector inequalities.
Poverty and ill-health are intertwined. Poor countries tend to have worse health outcomes than better-off countries. Within countries, poor people have worse health outcomes than better-off people....
Moreno-Serra, Rodrigo, Wagstaff, Adam
Although there is broad agreement that the way that health care providers are paid affects their performance, the empirical literature on the impacts of provider payment reforms is surprisingly thin....
Economic analysis of China's health care system: turning a new page
Winnie Yip, Adam Wagstaff, William C. Hsiao
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China's health system and its reform: a review of recent studies
Adam Wagstaff, Winnie Yip, Magnus Lindelow, William C. Hsiao
This paper provides a survey of the recent empirical research on China's 'old' health system (i.e. prior to the spate of reforms beginning in 2003). It argues that this research has enhanced our...