Types of Markets Within the Healthcare Systems; Examples from Balkan and East European Countries

Dan Sava ()
Additional contact information
Dan Sava: Private Consultant

A chapter in Global, Regional and Local Perspectives on the Economies of Southeastern Europe, 2021, pp 327-341 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The purpose of the paper is to provide a general framework from microeconomic perspective, for describing various markets within the health care system and to understanding the characteristics of main actors, especially those playing simultaneously the role of supply and of demand. The paper is based on a review of markets within the healthcare systems of Balkan and East European countries using for examples from the WHO monographs (HiT—Health Systems in Transition) on their respective health systems. The markets within the health systems can be grouped in two tiers. Those where the patient is the demand and the provider of health services is the supply, named here front-stage markets. and those where the provider of health services is the demand, and the producers of medical inputs are the supply, named back-stage markets. These markets are analyzed from microeconomic perspective. All of them are imperfect competition markets, where actors’ behavior is specific to the type of market, and suppliers benefit of asymmetric information. Health provider institutions and independent medical practicians play a double role within the health system. On the back-stage markets they are the demand, and simultaneously on the front-stage markets they are the supply. This double role position has important implications on the capacity of these to perform well virtually opposed roles. The paper also discusses how health insurance and government intervention affects those markets. The paper is important for policymakers, because it describes the economic incentives driving the actors in the health care system and their market power. It is useful in designing interventions regarding education of health care managers and efficiency of care delivery.

Keywords: Health care system; Imperfect markets; Asymmetric information; D40; D43; D49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:spr:prbchp:978-3-030-57953-1_21

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783030579531

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-57953-1_21

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().