background the pursuit of equity in health and healthcare has been the key feature of health policy in india. however, despite the policy significance, the volume of literature available on this issue is scarce. therefore, this paper is an attempt to examine the horizontal inequities in healthcare utilization, consisting of outpatient and inpatient care in 15 major states and north-eastern regi...

The article by Kent Ranson on the experience of the Self Employed Women’s Association’s (SEWA) Medical Insurance Fund in Gujarat, on pp. 613–621 of this issue of the Bulletin, focuses on catastrophic health care expenditure and thereby underlines the importance of ensuring that community financing schemes effectively protect households from impoverishment. It may well be a hope that such scheme...

OBJECTIVES A number of studies have pointed to the pressure that housing costs can exert on the resources available for food. The objectives of the present study were to characterise the relationship between the proportion of income absorbed by housing and the adequacy of household food expenditures across the Canadian population and within income quintiles; and to elucidate the impact of recei...

A greater focus on the role of health systems in health, development, and economic growth has led health policy research and analysis, domestic and global, to scrutinize health financing, insurance, and financial protection. Two World Health Reports (2000 and 2010) [1,2] have called for evaluating health system performance in terms of health financing, and the World Health Organization’s (WHO) ...

Public sector spending on health care clearly has a positive economic impact on local communities. Not only does such spending provide residents with better health care, but it is widely recognized as an investment that returns continual dividends in the form of better jobs, higher incomes, and additional state and local tax revenues. The results of a static input/output model shows that public...

1 gains in insurance coverage. The reform legislation now before Congress , however, cannot be relied on to control spending. The Obama administration and others have emphasized the cost-saving potential of prevention, comparative-effectiveness research, disease management, and health information technology. But there is little evidence that these worthwhile measures would produce meaningful co...

Poor health is a source of impoverishment among households in low -and middle- income countries (LMICs) and a subject of voluminous literature in recent years. This paper reviews recent empirical literature on measuring the economic impacts of health shocks on households. Key inclusion criteria were studies that explored household level economic outcomes (burden of out-of-pocket (OOP) health sp...

investing in research and development spending (r&d) affects total factor productivity (tfp).recently new theories of economic growth have emphasized the relationship between r&d and tfpand also identified a number of channels through which a country’s r&d affects tfp of its tradepartner. this study seeks to estimate the effect of agricultural r&d and education spending and some...