Marginal benefit incidence of public health spending: Evidence from Indonesian sub-national data

Ioana Kruse, Menno Pradhan and Robert Sparrow ()

Journal of Health Economics, 2012, vol. 31, issue 1, 147-157

Abstract: We examine the marginal effects of decentralized public health spending by incorporating estimates of behavioural responses to changes in health spending in benefit incidence analysis. The analysis is based on a panel dataset of 207 Indonesian districts over the period from 2001 to 2004. We show that district public health spending is largely driven by central government transfers, with an elasticity of around 0.9. We find a positive effect of public health spending on utilization of outpatient care in the public sector for the poorest two quartiles. We find no evidence that public expenditures crowd out utilization of private services or household health spending. Our analysis suggests that increased public health spending improves targeting to the poor, as behavioural changes in public health care utilization are pro-poor. Nonetheless, most of the benefits of the additional spending accrued to existing users of services, as initial utilization shares outweigh the behavioural responses.

Keywords: Decentralization; Public spending; Health care utilization; Benefit incidence; Indonesia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H72 H75 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167629611001305
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Marginal benefit incidence of public health spending: evidence from Indonesian sub-national data (2009)
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:eee:jhecon:v:31:y:2012:i:1:p:147-157

DOI: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2011.09.003

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J. P. Newhouse, A. J. Culyer, R. Frank, K. Claxton and T. McGuire

More articles in Journal of Health Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().