Showing papers by "Adam Wagstaff published in 1989"

Equity in the finance and delivery of health care: some tentative cross-country comparisons

Abstract: textEquity is widely acknowledged to be an important goal in the field of health care. Indeed, McLachlan and Maynard (1982) have gone so far as to suggest that' the vast majority of the population would elect for equity to be the prime consideration' (p. 556)—a view endorsed by Mooney (1986, p. 145). Several researchers have investigated how successful their own country's delivery and/or financing system is in achieving its stated equity goals. In general the strategy of these studies is to compare the current situation with some ideal or 'target* situation. Le Grand (1978), for example, in what has become a classic study in the field, compares the distributions across socio-economic groups of illness and public expenditure on health care in Britain in 1972, and concludes that the National Health Service (NHS) has failed to achieve equity in the delivery of health care.

Estimating efficiency in the hospital sector: a comparison of three statistical cost frontier models

Abstract: This paper reports the results of an empirical comparison of three statistical cost frontier models using data from 49 Spanish public hospitals. The models estimated include the deterministic cost frontier, a cross-section stochastic cost frontier (SCF) in which inefficiency is assumed to follow a half-normal distribution and a panel-data SCF in which inefficiency is assumed to remain constant over time. A non-frontier model is also estimated. The paper compares the estimates of average inefficiency obtained from the frontier models and the implied rankings of hospitals in terms of their 'costliness' (actual cost as a proportion of 'expected' cost)

Economic aspects of illicit drug markets and drug enforcement policies.

Abstract: This paper reviews the economics literature on illicit drug markets and drug enforcement policies. The first part of the paper examines the problems involved in establishing the parameters of the illicit market. The second part of the paper examines the contribution economics can make to the evaluation of drug enforcement policies: the discussion covers the determination of both the appropriate level of enforcement expenditure and the appropriate mix of policy measures.