For humanitarian reasons and the concern for households' economic and health security, the health sector is at the center of global development policy. Developing countries and the international community are scaling up health systems to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and are...

When the Japanese government adopted Western medicine in the late nineteenth century, it left intact the infrastructure of primary care by giving licenses to the existing practitioners and by initially setting the hurdle for entry into medical school low. Public financing of hospitals was kept...

This volume focuses on nine countries that have completed, or are well along in the process of carrying out, major health financing reforms. These countries have significantly expanded their people's health care coverage or maintained such coverage after prolonged political or economic shocks....

Low- and middle-income countries face major challenges to their health systems. These include a high burden of communicable disease and an emerging non-communicable disease burden. Coverage of effective services and interventions is inadequate and often constrained by funding availability. At...

This paper provides an analysis of the developments in public health spending over the past 40 years, as well as projections of public health spending for 50 advanced and emerging countries over 2011-50. The paper also quantifies the effects of specific health reforms on the growth of public...

This supplement provides country case studies on public health care expenditures and reform experiences in eight advanced and six emerging market economies. The case studies for the advanced economies seek to highlight specific episodes of success in containing public health spending during the...