控制環境異質性的跨國間健康生產效率比較

An Empirical Analysis of World Health Production with Cross-Country Heterogeneity

健康醫療系統的目標是為了達到全體人民健康狀況的極大化和減少健康的不均等情況。在面臨醫療成本急遽高漲的情況下，政策決策者開始關注醫療保健的過度投資問題，並且逐漸將定期的健康保健評估視為最主要的工作。這篇文章主要是利用健康生產多樣產出的特性和國家間異質性來檢驗全球健康保險系統的表現。本研究透過三階段的計量模型得到不受國家異質性影響的醫療生產技術效率，實證結果顯示，調整異質性後會顯著的改變全球健康醫療系統的效率評等，相關分析應將國家間異質性納入模型，才能在相同的基礎上比較生產效率。

The goal of a health care system is to maximize population health and reduce health inequality. Encountered by rapidly rising medical costs, policy makers have raised concerns over possible overinvestment in health care and have increasingly made the regular evaluation of health care systems central to their work. This study examines the performance of world health care systems by recognizing the multiple-output nature of health production and the existence of cross-country heterogeneity. A pure measure of the technical efficiency that is free from the influence of cross country heterogeneity is estimated. The empirical results show that the effect of the adjustment for heterogeneity significantly alters the efficiency ranks of worldwide health care systems.