This paper explores the major challenges to the sustainability of health sector financing in the countries of the Western Balkans - Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and the province of Kosovo. It focuses on how the incentives created...

The literature contains few impact evaluations of health sector reforms, especially those involving broad and simultaneous changes on both the demand and supply sides of the sector. This paper reports the results of a World Bank-funded health sector reform project in China known as Health VIII....

This paper investigates the extent to which the health systems of the Western Balkans (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and Kosovo) have succeeded in providing financial protection against adverse health events. The authors examine disparities in health status, healthcare...

This paper assesses the extent to which provider payment mechanisms can help developing countries address their leading health care problems. It first identifies four key problems in the health care systems in developing countries: 1) public facilities, which provide the bulk of secondary and...

This paper presents direct evidence on the quality of health care in low-income settings using a unique and original set of audit studies, where standardized patients were presented to a nearly representative sample of rural public and private primary care providers in the Indian state of Madhya...

Paying for performance (P4P) provides financial incentives for providers to increase the use and quality of care. P4P can affect health care by providing incentives for providers to put more effort into specific activities, and by increasing the amount of resources available to finance the...

This paper exploits the staggered rollout of Thailand s universal health coverage scheme to estimate its impacts on whether individuals report themselves as being too ill to work. The statistical power comes from the fact that there is an average of 62,000 respondents in the labor force survey...

There is building evidence in India that the delivery of health services suffers from an actual shortfall in trained health professionals, but also from unsatisfactory results of existing service providers working in the public and private sectors. This study focusses on the public sector and...

Providing protection against the financial risk of high out-of-pocket health spending is one of the main goals of the Philippines’ health strategy. Yet, as this paper shows using eight household surveys, health spending increased by 150 percent (real) from 2000 to 2012, with the sharpest...

This study employs a cluster randomized controlled trial and administrative health center data to investigate the effects of authorizing community health workers to deliver a new generation of contraceptive injections directly to women during routine home visits following comprehensive training....