There is a growing health economics literature in Europe using standardised crosscountry health inequality indexes. Yet limited efforts has been put forward to examine the extent to which such evidence is subject to any specific methodological and publication biases despite studies rely on...

Equity of access to health care is a key component of national and international health policy. The Irish health-care system is unusual in requiring the majority of the population to pay the full cost of GP care at the point of use. In contrast, all Scottish residents are entitled to free GP...

We analyze factors driving persistently higher financial intermediation costs in low-income countries (LICs) relative to emerging market (EMs) country comparators. Using the net interest margin as a proxy for financial intermediation costs at the bank level, we find that within LICs a...

The promotion and support of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) forms an essential ingredient of the policies designed to help improve Europe’s economic performance. A key issue is whether SMEs face difficulty obtaining bank loans. Using pre-crisis survey data from 2005 and 2006 for...