Economics for Health Sector Analysis: Concepts and Cases

The purpose of this manual is to introduce people trained in health professions, but not in economics, to the basic economic principles that will best help them decide how to allocate resources in the health sector. The manual contains five chapters. Chapter one examines the links between the health sector and the other components of the developing economy. Chapter two examines the affordability of financing health projects. Chapter three looks at the specifics of a single project, using a series of memoranda from the chief planning officer of the Ministry of Health of a fictional country (Barsoom) to a deputy assistant planner, thus demonstrating three important practical techniques: i) how to develop financial cost estimates of a health care project; ii) how to determine whether a government is able to afford a given project whose future costs have been estimated; and iii) how to recover part of a project ' s cost and to predict the revenue that a project can raise. The fourth chapter looks at methods of estimating a project ' s effects as well as its costs and then uses the results to conduct a cost-effectiveness or cost-benefit analysis. The fifth chapter demonstrates the techniques of cost-effectiveness analysis in five case studies based on World Bank experience.