Public Goods and Income Distribution

The collected works of

This book shows how to implement a variety of analytic tools that allow health equity - along different dimensions and in different spheres - to be quantified. Questions that the techniques can help provide answers for include the following: Have gaps in health outcomes between the poor and the better-off grown in specific countries or in the developing world as a whole? Are they larger in one country than in another? Are health sector subsidies more equally distributed in some countries than in others? Is health care utilization equitably distributed in the sense that people in equal need receive similar amounts of health care irrespective of their income? Are health care payments more progressive in one health care financing system than in another? What are catastrophic payments? How can they be measured? How far do health care payments impoverish households? This volume has a simple aim: to provide researchers and analysts with a step-by-step practical guide to the measurement of a variety of aspects of health equity. Each chapter includes worked examples and computer code. The authors hope that these guides, and the easy-to-implement computer routines contained in them, will stimulate yet more analysis in the field of health equity, especially in developing countries. They hope this, in turn, will lead to more comprehensive monitoring of trends in health equity, a better understanding of the causes of these inequities, more extensive evaluation of the impacts of development programs on health equity, and more effective policies and programs to reduce inequities in the health sector.

Analyzing health equity using household survey data : a guide to techniques and their implementation

The results of Samuelson [5-7] in the theory of public goods have provided the basis for most subsequent discussion of the optimum provision of public goods. Samuelson showed that a necessary condition for Pareto Optimality (and hence for maximizing a social welfare function which responds positively to individual utilities) is that the sum of the marginal rates of substitution (E MRS) between a public good and a private good be equal to the marginal rate of transformation (MRT). The sole constraint is that production is in the aggregate production set. This optimum can be achieved as a competitive equilibrium with the government supplying the public good up to the point where I MRS = MRT and financing its production by lump-sum taxation. Lump-sum transfers may also be employed to achieve the appropriate income distribution. The achievement of the " full " optimum described above depends on lump-sum taxes and transfers being feasible. If the taxation tools available exclude lump-sum taxation, then the optimization problem must be modified to include explicitly the means by which government revenue is raised. The importance of this point was clearly recognized by Pigou [3], who argued that the cost to consumers of the public good would be larger than just the necessary resources on account of the " indirect " damage caused by taxation:

background

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2296403.pdf

Pigou, taxation and public goods

Health care is a basic service essential in any effort to combat poverty, and is often subsidized with public funds to help achieve that aim. This paper examines public spending on curative health care in several African countries and finds that this spending favours mostly the better-off rather than the poor. It concludes that this targeting problem cannot be solved simply by adjusting the subsidy allocations. The constraints that prevent the poor from taking advantage of these services must also be addressed if the public subsidies are to be effective in reaching the poor.

/pdf/public-spending-on-health-care-in-africa-do-the-poor-benefit-29b9wi5pem.pdf

Public spending on health care in Africa: do the poor benefit?

Education and health care are basic services essential in any effort to combat poverty and are often subsidized with public funds to help achieve that purpose. This paper examines the effectiveness of public social spending on education and health care in several African countries and finds that these programs favor not the poor, but those who are better-off. It concludes that this targeting problem cannot be solved simply by adjusting the subsidy program. The constraints that prevent the poor from taking advantage of these services must also be addressed if the public subsidies are to be effective. Measuring the benefits of publicly provided goods to individuals is a matter of longstanding concern in the economics literature. For market-based goods and services, the prices consumers pay can be taken as reflecting underlying values and can be used to yield measures of welfare that can be compared across individuals and over time.

methods

/pdf/public-social-spending-in-africa-do-the-poor-benefit-25luni86z3.pdf

Public Goods and Income Distribution

Citations

The collected works of

Analyzing health equity using household survey data : a guide to techniques and their implementation

Pigou, taxation and public goods

Public spending on health care in Africa: do the poor benefit?

Public social spending in Africa : do the poor benefit?

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