Economic Incentives in the Health Care Industry: Implications for Health Policy Making

On 12 and 13 September 1985, the University of Antwerp held its third international conference on ‘Health and Economics’. The organizing committee had chosen the economic incentive structure operating in health care as the central theme and invited a number of distinguished speakers from several countries to address this topic from different points of view. The main purpose was to examine the experiences abroad in order to derive conclusions for Belgian health care policy. In spite of the large diversity of health care systems and incentive structures in the various countries, some consensus did emerge on how actual outcomes in terms of efficiency and equity could be brought nearer to the desired outcomes. But before we try to formulate the most important implications for health policy makers, we will first give an overview of the papers that were presented. They are all published elsewhere in this issue.