We study the steady upward trend of Health Care Expenditures (HCE) over GDP for a sample of OECD countries between 1970 and 2007. While the US is clearly an outlier, almost all of the additional increase in US HCE happened during the 1978-1990 period. We perform two growth accounting exercises...

Economic shocks represent a challenge for health systems because they decrease public revenue, and at the same time, increase the need for publicly funded health care. Since health expenditure is rapidly increasing in most countries, its efficiency must be tested. The subject of research in this...

Traditional law and economic analysis views postemployment restrictions, ranging from noncompete agreements to intellectual property controls over an ex-employee’s knowledge and skill, as necessary for economic investment and market growth. The orthodox economic analysis theorizes that without...

Between 1970 and 1992 growth in spending on health care services in the U.S. outpaced total consumption growth by 3.5 percent per year, and the share of spending devoted to health services doubled from 7.3 percent to 14.6 percent. Since 1992 the growth rate of spending on health care services...

Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are currently the leading cause of death worldwide. In this paper, we examine the channels through which economic growth affects NCDs' epidemiology. Following a production function approach, we develop a basic technique to break up the impact of economic growth...

Simon Kuznets’ (1955) hypothesis that as a country develops, a natural cycle develops where inequality first increases, then decreases, has become known at the Kuznets curve. This pattern has also been applied to the environment, an ‘Environmental Kuznets curve’, showing that as...

This paper offers an integrated view of the relationships between health spending, medical innovation, health status, growth and welfare. Health spending triggers technological progress, which is a potential source of better outcomes in terms of longevity and quality of life, a direct source of...