The relationship between health policy in low-income countries (LICs) and structural adjustment programs devised by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been the subject of intense controversy over past decades. While the influence of the IMF on health policy can operate through various pathways, one main link is via public spending on health. The IMF has claimed that its programs enhance ...

There has been recent controversy about whether aid directed specifically to health has caused recipient governments to reallocate their own funds to non-health areas. At the same time, general budget support (GBS) has been increasing. GBS allows governments to set their own priorities, but little is known about how these additional resources are subsequently used. This paper uses cross-country...

The United States is typically seen as an outlier in health spending when compared with other advanced nations. Recent improvements in health accounting in lower- and middle-income countries suggest some common features with the high and pluralistic spending in the United States. The author discusses recent developments and findings in health accounting outside the Organization for Economic Coo...

Åke Blomqvist (2001) raises the issue of relevance in his review of my two papers (Nyman, 1999a,b). He agrees that because of the skewed distribution in health expenditures (which concentrates most of income transfers from health insurance in the hands of those few who become ill), income transfers explain a large portion of the additional consumption due to becoming insured. Nevertheless, he a...

Background: A dramatic increase in healthcare expenditures is a major health policy concern worldwide. Understanding factors that underlie the growth in healthcare expenditures is essential to assist decision-makers in finding best policies to manage healthcare costs. We aimed to examine the determinants of healthcare spending in Iran over the periods of 1978-2011. Methods: A time series ana...

This study examines whether there is variation by worker income on how an HSA-eligible health plan affects health care services use and spending. Does the typically flat-dollar gap between a health plan’s deductible and the employer contribution to a health savings account (HSA) have a bigger impact on the use of health care services among lowerincome workers than it does for higher-income work...

fi scal stimulus package centered on " bang for the buck, " that is, on whether tax cuts or spending increases would produce more jobs. This limited perspective is very misleading, however: the choice of spending versus taxes should turn fi rst and foremost on the purposes of government, or what economists quaintly call " the allocation of resources. " It's silly to debate whether investing in ...

This analysis draws upon data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and other cross-national analyses to compare health care spending, supply, utilization, prices, and health outcomes across 13 high-income countries: Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These...