Many Latin American countries have experienced improvements in income over recent decades, with several of them now classified as high-income or upper middle-income in terms of conventional metrics. But has this change been mirrored in improvements across the different areas of people’s lives? How’s Life in Latin America? Measuring Well-being for Policy Making addresses this question by presenting comparative evidence for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) with a focus on 11 LAC countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay).
'Beyond Survival' breaks new ground in the ongoing debate about health finance and financial protection from the costs of health care. The evidence and discussion support the need to consider financial protection, in addition to health status, as a policy objective when setting priorities for health systems. This book reviews the Latin American experience with health reform in the last 20 years and the fundamentals of health system financing, using new evidence to show the magnitude and mechanisms that determine the impoverishing effects of health events (diseases, accidents, and those of the life cycle). It provides options for policy makers on how to protect, and help household to protect themselves,against this impoverishment. The authors use empirical evidence from six case studies commissioned for this report, on Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, and Mexico. This book provides policy makers with a solid conceptual basis for decisions on the contents of mandatory health insurance benefit packages, choices of financing mechanisms, and the roles of public policy in this field. 'Beyond Survival' provides an in-depth analysis of, and organizational alternatives for, risk pooling and health insurance for financial protection. It analyzes the urgent need to extend risk pooling to the informal sector, the challenges for current social insurance arrangements, and options for policy makers to effectively extend risk pooling to the informal sector.
This book examines issues concerning how developing countries will have to prepare for demographic and epidemiologic change. Much of the current literature focuses on the prevalence of specific diseases and their economic consequences, but a need exists to consider the consequences of the epidemiological transition: the change in mortality patterns from infectious and parasitic diseases to chronic and degenerative ones. Among the topics covered are the association between the health of children and adults, the strong orientation of many international health organizations toward infant and child health, and how the public and private sectors will need to address and confront the large-scale shifts in disease and demographic characteristics of populations in developing countries.
This second edition of Government at a Glance: Latin America and the Caribbean provides the latest available data on public administrations in the LAC region and compares it to OECD countries. It contains new indicators on public finances, centres of government, regulatory governance, open government, digital government and public procurement. This edition also includes a special feature on health budgeting. After a decade of sustained economic growth reinforced by high commodity prices, economic conditions are deteriorating in the LAC region. In this context, LAC governments are expected to design and deliver more inclusive, transparent and efficient policies. This report provides policy makers with performance measurements and offers comparative perspective. Good indicators are needed more than ever to help governments make informed decisions and tough choices, in order to maintain progress and improvements in the region.
The health systems we enjoy today, and expected medical advances in the future, will be difficult to finance from public resources without major reforms. Public health spending in OECD countries has grown rapidly over most of the last half century. These spending increases have contributed to ...
This third edition of Government at a Glance Latin America and the Caribbean provides the latest available evidence on public administrations and their performance in the LAC region and compares it to OECD countries. This publication includes indicators on public finances and economics, public employment, centres of government, regulatory governance, open government data, public sector integrity, public procurement and for the first time core government results (e.g. trust, inequality reduction).
World Bank Technical Paper No. 274. The preparation of the World Bank's World Development Report 1993: Investing in Health (WDR) included an effort to assemble internationally comparable statistics on a broad range of health and health system indicators. Data had to be compiled from existing sources while analytical efforts were made to improve the quality and comparability of the data. This paper presents an expanded and updated version of the WDR estimates of 1990 health expenditures for the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. Whereas the population cut-off for inclusion in the WDR was 3 million, these tables include almost all countries in the region. This update of the expenditures results in a substantial upward revision in the estimated percentage of GNP spent on health in the region in 1990 from 4 to 6%.
Health at a Glance compares key indicators for population health and health system performance across OECD members, candidate and partner countries. It highlights how countries differ in terms of the health status and health-seeking behaviour of their citizens; access to and quality of health care; and the resources available for health. Analysis is based on the latest comparable data across 80 indicators, with data coming from official national statistics, unless otherwise stated.
Abstract: Health systems are not just about improving health: good ones also ensure that people are protected from the financial consequences of receiving medical care. Anecdotal evidence suggests health systems often perform badly in this respect, apparently with devastating consequences for households, especially poor ones and near-poor ones. Two principal methods have been used to measure financial protection in health. Both relate a household's out-of-pocket spending to a threshold defined in terms of living standards in the absence of the spending: the first defines spending as catastrophic if it exceeds a certain percentage of the living standards measure; the second defines spending as impoverishing if it makes the difference between a household being above and below the poverty line. The paper provides an overview of the methods and issues arising in each case, and presents empirical work in the area of financial protection in health, including the impacts of government policy. The paper also reviews a recent critique of the methods used to measure financial protection.
