Government doctor absenteeism and its effects on consumer demand in rural north India

Richard A. Iles

Health Economics, 2019, vol. 28, issue 4, 475-491

Abstract: Government doctor absenteeism from their public posts is a sizable problem across developing economies. The consumer demand estimation for outpatient fever treatment presented in this paper investigates the interrelationship between government doctor absenteeism and the large informal healthcare sector. Using a counterfactual framework, this paper estimates treatment effect of eliminating government doctor absenteeism. The effects are measured by changes to the market share of government Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) providers and resulting own‐price elasticities of demand for government MBBS providers and unqualified providers. Modelling incorporates patients expected health outcomes by provider via the use of a qualitative measure of word‐of‐mouth recommendations. Results indicate that eliminating government MBBS provider absenteeism in North India would increase utilisation of government outpatient fever treatments from 18% to 50%.

Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.3858

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:wly:hlthec:v:28:y:2019:i:4:p:475-491

Access Statistics for this article

Health Economics is currently edited by Alan Maynard, John Hutton and Andrew Jones

More articles in Health Economics from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().