Anmerkungen:
In: Pacific Economic Review, Vol. 17, 2012
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments January 1, 2009 erstellt
Beschreibung:
In public health sectors of many developing countries, patients offer payments to their doctors outside the official payment channels. We argue that the fundamental cause of informal payments is that formal prices cannot fully differentiate patients' various needs. We compare welfare implications of different policies that can be used to regulate informal payments. Patient heterogeneity plays a central role in the comparison. Compared with banning informal payments, allowing them improves patient welfare if and only if patients' willingness to pay differs significantly. We also show that selling the right to choose physicians publicly always improves both patient welfare and social welfare