EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Assessing equitable health financing for universal health coverage: a case study of South Africa

John Ataguba ()

Applied Economics, 2016, vol. 48, issue 35, 3293-3306

Abstract: This article argues that an assessment of progressivity over time can provide an indication of progress towards a ‘more’ progressive or a ‘less’ regressive health financing system and can be useful to policymakers. It introduces a framework to characterize ‘shifts’ in progressivity in health financing between two time periods using the popularly known Kakwani index of progressivity and other associated indices. It also decomposes the ‘shifts’ in progressivity into the relative contributions of the changes in income distribution and the changes in the distribution of health payments. Further, it proposes graphics that statistically analyses how the ‘shifts’ in progressivity vary along the distribution of income. A pro-poor (pro-rich) shift implies that the health financing mechanism is becoming more (less) progressive or less (more) regressive between two time periods. A proportional shift means that progressivity is constant between the two periods. This framework is applied to nationally representative household data from South Africa. It emerged that such characterization is a very useful tool for policy in assessing progress towards equitable health financing.

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00036846.2015.1137549 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:applec:v:48:y:2016:i:35:p:3293-3306

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEC20

DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2015.1137549

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:taf:applec:v:48:y:2016:i:35:p:3293-3306