Informal patient payments are a key characteristic of nearly all Central and Eastern European health care systems (1–3). Apart from formal patient payments, which are regulated by national legislation (4) and quasi-formal charges, which are set by the health care provider in the absence of clear government regulations (5–7), there are also informal payments (also known as “under-the-table” or “...

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BACKGROUND Many health systems in Africa are funded primarily through out-of-pocket payments. Out-of-pocket payments prevent people from seeking care, can result to catastrophic health spending and lead to impoverishment. This paper estimates the burden of out-of-pocket payments in Kenya; the incidence and intensity of catastrophic health care expenditure and the effect of health spending on na...

Pricing should speed up the substitution of low cost electronic payments for expensive paper-based transactions and cash. But by how much? Norway has explicitly priced individual payment transactions and rapidly shifted to electronic payments while the Netherlands has experienced the same shift without direct pricing. Controlling for differences between countries, we estimate the incremental ef...

Matching frictions imply the value of being unemployed depends on the stream of future UI payments. The sooner a worker's eligibility to UI payments expires, the lower the value to remaining unemployed. In the moral hazard literature, declining UI payments are used to trigger greater search e®ort. Here declining UI payments undermine the worker's bargaining position and (partially) corrects the...

October-December 1951 but declined gram amounting to $9.3 billion for 17.2 percent from that for the third 1952. quarter of 1952. The increases resulted The estimated number of employers from the growth in economic activity; paying taxable wages was about 3.6 the declines followed the seasonal patmillion in each quarter from the betern observed in past years and reginning of 1952 through Januar...

In many developing countries, public patients offer payments to their doctors outside the official payment channels. We argue that the fundamental reason for these informal payments is that formal prices cannot fully differentiate patients’ various needs. We compare patient welfare and social efficiency when informal payments are allowed with the scenario when they are banned. Patient heterogen...

PRIVATE consumer expenditures for medical care amounted to almost. $22 billion in 1962. Approximately $14 billion, or 66 percent of t,he total, represented direct payments by consumers ; the remaining $8 billion was in the form of payments for health insurance. The aggregate amount of the increase from 1961 was almost $1.2 billion or 5.8 percent. Direct payments rose only 2.2 percent, and healt...

This analysis utilizes farm-level data to evaluate the extent to which U.S. farm program benefits, particularly direct payments, bring about distortions in production. The issue is important in WTO negotiations and in the debate over the distortionary effects of decoupled (“green-box”) payments. Our results suggest that the distortions brought about by AMTA payments, though statistically signif...