Health shocks in China: are the poor and uninsured less protected ?

Magnus Lindelow and Adam Wagstaff

No 3740, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: Health shocks have been shown to have important economic consequences in industrial countries. Less is known about how health shocks affect income, consumption, labor market outcomes, and medical expenditures in middle- and low-income countries. The authors explore these issues in China. In addition to providing new evidence on the general impact of health shocks, they also extend previous work by assessing the extent of risk protection afforded by formal health insurance, and by examining differences in the impact of health shocks between the rich and poor. The authors find that health shocks are associated with a substantial and significant reduction in income and labor supply. There are indications that the impact on income is less important for the insured, possibly because health insurance coverage is also associated with limited sickness insurance, but the effect is not significant. They also find evidence that negative health shocks are associated with an increase in unearned income for the poor but not the non-poor. This effect is however not strong enough to offset the impact on overall income. The loss in income is a consequence of a reduction in labor supply for the head of household, and the authors do not find evidence that other household members compensate by increasing their labor supply. Finally, negative health shocks are associated with a significant increase in out-of-pocket health care expenditures. More surprisingly, there is some evidence that the increase is greater for the insured than the uninsured. The findings suggest that households are exposed to considerable health-related shocks to disposable income, both through loss of income and health expenditures, and that health insurance offers very limited protection.

Keywords: Health Monitoring&Evaluation; Health Economics&Finance; Rural Poverty Reduction; Housing&Human Habitats; Health Law (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-10-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-dev, nep-hea, nep-ias and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (50)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSC ... ered/PDF/wps3740.pdf (application/pdf)

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:wbk:wbrwps:3740

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().