 Governance and the effectiveness of public health subsidies: Evidence from Ghana, Kenya and UgandaRebecca Dizon-Ross, Pascaline Dupas and Jonathan Robinson Journal of Public Economics, 2017, vol. 156, issue C, 150-169 Abstract: Distributing subsidized health products through existing health infrastructure could substantially and cost-effectively improve health in sub-Saharan Africa. There is, however, widespread concern that poor governance – in particular, limited health worker accountability – seriously undermines the effectiveness of subsidy programs. We audit targeted bed net distribution programs to quantify the extent of agency problems. We find that around 80% of the eligible receive the subsidy as intended, and up to 15% of subsidies are leaked to ineligible people. Supplementing the program with simple financial or monitoring incentives for health workers does not improve performance further and is thus not cost-effective in this context. Keywords: Leakage; Extortion; Shirking; Motivation (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:pubeco:v:156:y:2017:i:c:p:150-169 DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2017.09.005 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Public Economics is currently edited by R. Boadway and J. Poterba More articles in Journal of Public Economics from Elsevier |
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