Health, social policy, and inclusive growth in MENA

Randa Alami

No 188, Working Papers from Department of Economics, SOAS University of London, UK

Abstract: This paper takes stock of the current status of health sectors in MENA. From the narrow perspective of national aggregate indicators, as with most middle income countries, the region has seen significant achievements. Yet, health sectors face systemic challenges, and suffer from significant and persistent inequities in health outcomes, access, delivery, and distribution of health services. Out of pocket spending levels are amongst the highest in the world, and are driven by: privatisation, poor social protection and insurance coverage, and the inability to respond to the epidemiological transition. Consequently, the financial burden of healthcare forces significant swathes of the population into poverty, or to forgo healthcare altogether. Sectoral policies have been piecemeal and short-termist, with a clear neglect of public health sectors. These deficiencies are more evident if MENA is benchmarked against many of their peers, or against the international consensus of Universal Health Care (UHC).

Keywords: health; health inequity; universal health care; Middle East; inclusive growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H51 I14 I15 I18 N35 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2014-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara and nep-hea
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.soas.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2022-10/economics-wp188.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:soa:wpaper:188

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, SOAS University of London, UK Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chandni Dwarkasing ().