With the movement toward universal health coverage gaining momentum, the global health research community has made significant efforts to advance knowledge about the impact of various schemes to expand population coverage. The impacts on efficiency, quality, and gaps in service utilization of...

Subsidized voluntary enrollment in government-run health insurance schemes is often proposed as a way of increasing coverage among informal sector workers and their families. This paper reports the results of a cluster randomized control trial in which 3,000 households in 20 communes in Vietnam...

This paper exploits the staggered rollout of Vietnam’s hospital autonomization policy to estimate its impacts on several key health sector outcomes including hospital efficiency, use of hospital care, and out-of-pocket spending. The authors use six years of panel data covering all Vietnam’s...

Universal Health Coverage is a powerful framework for a nation aiming to protect their population against health risks. However, countries face multiple challenges in implementing, achieving and sustaining UHC strategies. Sharing and learning from diverse country experiences may enable to foster...

A simulation model is developed for Vietnam to project smoking prevalence and associated premature mortality. The model examines independently and as a package the effects of five types of tobacco control policies: tax increases, clean air laws, mass media campaigns, advertising bans, and youth...

How is public sector compensation best aligned with the market? In industrial countries a common reference is the salary paid by private employers for similar jobs (the"jobs approach"). But comparable jobs are formal, and in developing countries the relevant alternative for many public sector...

This paper outlines a framework for comparing empirically overall health inequality and socioeconomic health inequality. The framework, which is developed for both individual-level data and grouped data, is illustrated using data on malnutrition amongst Vietnamese children and on health utility...

The health systems of Japan and the Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan), and the recent reforms to them, provide many potentially valuable lessons to East Asia's developing countries. All five systems have managed to keep a check on health spending despite their different...

This note explores the implications for measuring socioeconomic inequality in health of choosing one measure of SES rather than another. Three points emerge. First, whilst similar rankings in the two the SES measures will result in similar inequalities, this is a sufficient condition not a...