Despite the fact that healthcare spending in Kazakhstan increased annually from 2011 to 2020, the country's healthcare system is seriously underfunded. For this reason, household spending in Kazakhstan plays a significant role in overall health spending. According to WHO, if the share of private...

The EU is challenged by a persistent leadership gap in the global health innovation landscape, with the US leading in corporate health innovation and venture capital (VC) funding. The EU health innovation landscape is more concentrated in older "incumbent leading firms," while the US has a more...

Accelerated progress towards and achievement of universal health coverage (UHC) has become a central goal of the Government of Pakistan's (GoP) policy agenda in health in recent years. Both at the center and in the provinces, Pakistan's domestic governments have now consistently reiterated,...

Innovation is considered essential to the quality and sustainability of healthcare systems. However, the path from innovative idea to adopted reality is complex and fraught with barriers. The way in which healthcare innovations are financed is often mentioned as a major stumbling block, but a...

In the official models for projections and policy analysis used by the Treasury and the Social Security and Medicare Trustees, many key variables are assumed as a continuation of past trends. Even the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), with more sophisticated models, makes certain simplifying...

The Health Facilities Enhancement Program (HFEP) is a capital investment grant administered by the Department of Health (DOH), designed to help local government units (LGUs) augment their health infrastructure, such as primary healthcare facilities, hospitals, and equipment. Over the past...

This report explores the potential of maturing technologies to address specific health financing challenges in East and Southern Africa. To the extent possible, it draws on examples from countries in the region and shows how some technologies have been used in other sectors that could inform...

Background Out-of-pocket payment remains one of the ways to finance health care in Ethiopia accounting 31%. These out-of-pocket health expense leads citizens' face catastrophic and impoverishing expenditure. The most recent survey-based study of catastrophic and impoverishing health expenditure...

Background Universal Health Coverage (UHC) is a central component of the Sustainable Development Goals, and integrated healthcare is recognized as a key pathway to achieving UHC. China's healthcare reform, aimed at real- izing the "Healthy China 2035" goal, faces challenges in ensuring the...

The Colombian Ministry of Health's decision to increase the health insurance premium (Capitation Payment Unit) by 5.36% for 2025, close to the inflation rate, has sparked controversy. This adjustment disregards factors that contribute to rising healthcare costs, leading to concerns over the...

Health spending, and the performance of the NHS, will feature prominently in the upcoming general election campaign. Many different factors matter for NHS performance and for the wider health of the population, but one important factor is the level of spending on health services. In this IFS...

We examine the link between public spending in health and health outcomes by leveraging differential exposure to a health spending reform prompted by Brazil's 29th Constitutional Amendment, which mandated municipalities to spend at least 15% of their budget on health. We map dynamic effects on...

Das deutsche Gesundheitssystem bietet im internationalen Vergleich eine umfassende Versorgung, jedoch zu hohen Kosten und mit Qualitätsdefiziten. Im internationalen Vergleich mit OECD-Ländern liegt Deutschland mit knapp zwölf Prozent des BIPs bei den zweithöchsten relativen Ausgaben für...

The OPEC governments mainly financed their budgets by relying on oil production, similar to many other governments globally. However, the world’s ongoing economic development, changes in countries’ political relationships, and exchange of sanctions could have adverse consequences for...

The amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005) (IHR) agreed upon in May 2024 are important for strengthening global health emergency preparedness and response. The negotiations resulted in the IHR amendment now recognizing the importance of equity, including equitable access to...

The World Health Organization has advocated the earmarking of health-related taxes to mobilize revenues to be spent on public health spending. While there are certain advantages and disadvantages in the use of earmarked taxes to fund healthcare, its ability to mobilize revenues will depend on...

Hypothetical bias is the discrepancy between stated preferences and actual choices. As such, it is one of the key issues regarding the use of hypothetical survey methods and therefore highly relevant for economists in understanding human behavior and refining policy interventions. Hypothetical...

The development of the healthcare system is an important task for every country, given that long-term economic and social development is absolutely impossible without a healthy nation. Therefore, improving public health and ensuring that the maximum number of people have access to quality...

This study examines the effects of urbanization on household health expenditure. Using a unique bi-annually household-level dataset from 2012-2016 from Vietnam, we obtain key findings as follows. To mitigate possible endogeneity concerns, we utilize a two-stage least squares regression (2SLS)...

Background: This study aims to examine the impact of different healthcare payment systems, specifically salary and fee-for-service (FFS) models, on service provision, patient welfare, and quality of care. The influence of payment models on healthcare delivery and patient outcomes, as well as how...

Global turbulence and uncertainty force civil servants and executors to optimise public finance distribution. The COVID-19 pandemic aligned with the necessity of assessing the efficiency of healthcare financing due to its capability in overcoming the negative consequences. The paper analyses the...

This study uses data from 1986 to 2021 and the auto-regressive distributed lag model to explore India's fiscal policy determinants of government health spending. The results find two structural breaks in time: (i) 2002 for state government health spending (SGHS) and (ii) 2014 for central...

Individuals in the UK with health conditions may be entitled to two types of benefits - incapacity benefits (for those whose condition prevents them from working) and disability benefits (to help with extra living costs arising from the disability). Since the onset of the pandemic, there has...

The Scottish Government's Budget for 2024-25 takes place at a time of particular uncertainty about the future funding environment. UK government spending plans both for the coming year and for later years seem likely to be topped up, but when and by how much is unclear. The current UK government...

This chapter of our second annual Budget Report looks at Scottish tax policy and revenue, the overall amount of funding available for Scottish public services, and planned spending on different individual services in the coming financial year, 2024-25. In several important respects, the Scottish...

This chapter of our second annual Budget Report looks beyond 2024-25 to the medium-term outlook for the Scottish Government's funding, and the implications of the funding picture for the choices and trade-offs faced when allocating funding between areas of the budget. The Scottish Government had...

Health insurance premiums often do not reflect individual health risks, implying redistribution from individuals with low health risks to individuals with high health risks. This paper studies whether more cost-sharing leads to less redistribution and to lower welfare of high-risk individuals....

Upcoding in Medicare has been a topic of interest to economists and policy makers for nearly 40 years. While upcoding is generally understood as "billing for services at higher level of complexity than the service actually pro- vided or documented," it has a wide range of definitions within the...

Background Indonesia has the world's second-highest tuberculosis (TB) burden, with 969,000 annual TB infec- tions. In 2017, Indonesia faced significant challenges in TB care, with 18% of cases missed, 29% of diagnosed cases unreported, and 55.4% of positive results not notified. The government...

Background Due to population aging, healthcare expenditure is projected to increase substantially in developed countries like Spain. However, prior research indicates that health status, not merely age, is a key driver of healthcare costs. This study analyzed data from over 1.25 million...

We estimate the effects of the Comprehensive Medical Reform (CMR), a large-scale and comprehensive health care system reform in China, on medical burden and health status. Leveraging a time-varying difference-in-differences methodology and utilizing microdata from the Chinese Family Panel Study...