This paper reviews the development of the Medical Financial Assistance program (MFA) in rural China, including design and implementation processes, and assesses major areas for improvement. Jointly financed by the central and local governments, MFA provides cash assistance to poor households for the purchase of medical services. Because policy design and implementation are decentralized to loca...

This paper proposes a theoretical framework to analyze the impacts of credit and technology shocks on business cycle dynamics, where firms rely on banks and households for capital financing. Firms are identical ex ante but differ ex post due to different realizations of firm specific technology shocks, possibly leading to default by some firms. The paper advances a new modelling approach for th...

The present study aimed to investigate the households' impoverishment due to the healthcare costs in Shiraz in 2012. In this household's survey, 800 households were studied in Shiraz. The study sample was selected using stratified and cluster sampling in the urban and rural areas, respectively. The information was collected using the household section of the World Health Survey questionnaire. I...

Economic games such as the Ultimatum Game (UG) and Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) are widely used paradigms for studying fairness and cooperation. Monetary versions of these games involve two players splitting an arbitrary sum of money. In real life, however, people's propensity to engage in cooperative behavior depends on their effort and contribution; factors that are well known to affect perception...

BACKGROUND In resource-constrained health systems medical travel is a common alternative to seeking unavailable health services. This paper was motivated by the need to understand better the impact of such travel on households and health systems. METHODS We used primary data from 344 subsidized and 471 non-subsidized inbound medical travellers during June to December 2013 drawn from the North...

A fundamental principle of WHO’s work in health financing is the concept of universal coverage. This requires access for all people to appropriate promotive, preventive, curative and rehabilitative health care at an affordable cost. This is one requirement of health for all and is consistent with the principle of equity in access. The objective of universal coverage is also associated with equi...

INTRODUCTION Previous studies have shown that Swiss health-care financing is particularly regressive. However, as it has been emphasized in the 2011 OECD Review of the Swiss Health System, the inter cantonal variations of income-related inequities are still broadly unexplored. The present paper aims to fill this gap by analyzing the differences in the level of equity of health-care system finan...

INTRODUCTION National health accounts (NHAs) provide useful information to aid in understanding the health care financing system. This article aims to present a profile of health system financing in Dubai using data from the NHA. We also aim to compare the provider structure of financing schemes in Dubai with those of the State of Qatar and selected Organization for Economic Cooperation and Dev...