Background: The National Health Accounts keep track of all healthcare related activities from the beginning (i.e. resource provision), to the end (i.e. service provision). This study was conducted to address following questions: How is the Iranian health system funded? Who distribute the funds? For what services are the funds spent on?, What service providers receive the funds? Methods: The...

BACKGROUND The liberalisation of trade in services which began in 1995 under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has generated arguments for and against its potential health effects. Our goal was to explore the relationship between the liberalisation of services under the GATS and three health indicators--life expectancy (LE), under-5 mortalit...

Health financing has been considered as an important building block of a health system and has a key role in promoting universal health coverage in the Vietnam. This paper aims to describe the pattern of health expenditure, including total health expenditure and composition of health expenditure, over the last two decades in Vietnam. The paper mainly uses the data from Vietnam National Health A...

BACKGROUND In the Indian context, a household's caste characteristics are most relevant for identifying its poverty and vulnerability status. Inadequate provision of public health care, the near-absence of health insurance and increasing dependence on the private health sector have impoverished the poor and the marginalised, especially the scheduled tribe population. This study examines caste-b...

This descriptive–analytical study used data envelopment analysis to evaluated the technical efficiency (TE) of health systems in Member States of the World Health Organization Eastern Mediterranean Region during 2004–2011. Life expectancy and infant mortality were used as outputs. Per capita total expenditure on health, and number of physicians, nurses and midwives and hospital beds per 1000 pe...

OBJECTIVE The present study aims analyze and compare structural features in order to establish a model about the decline in HIV/AIDS infection (greater than or equal to 25 %) in twenty-two countries between 2001 and 2011. METHODS Retrospective cohort focused on social determinants of health perspective. The methodology was mainly documentary (epidemic behavior) and quantitative (simple linear...

AIM The aim of this study was to ascertain the levels and mechanisms of funding public health in Europe. METHODS A review of published and unpublished documents and expenditure data was undertaken. RESULTS Expenditure on public health in Europe is difficult to determine, but data from national health accounts suggest that it differs greatly across countries, both as a percentage of total he...

Health economists have studied the determinants of the expected value of health status as a function of medical and non-medical inputs, often finding small marginal effects of the former. However, medical inputs may have an additional benefit in the form of a reduced variability of health status. Using the standard deviation of life expectancy in 24 OECD countries between 1960 and 2005, a 10 pe...