Author Correction: Years of life lost to COVID-19 in 81 countries (Scientific Reports, (2021), 11, 1, (3504), 10.1038/s41598-021-83040-3)

With the spread of the coronavirus disease across over 100 countries and its status upgraded to that of a pandemic on 11 March 2020 (World Health Organization), increased attention is being placed on the policy measures that may be required to effectively curb the rate of contagion within and across countries. Currently, several governments, such as China, Italy, Spain, Japan and the Republic of Korea, have implemented emergency measures informed by the principle of social distancing to limit the spread of coronavirus (World Health Organization). Ever since the virus was first identified in Wuhan City in December 2019, this succession of uncoordinated policy responses offers a set of natural experiments that should be analysed to understand the successes and failures of containment at the societal level. In this analysis, we focus on the case of Italy, the hardest hit country in Europe (Dong, Du, & Gardner, 2020; World Health Organization). The objective of this short note is to provide an even-handed analys

Cost efficiency in primary care contracting: A stochastic frontier cost function approach

The principal aim of this paper is to estimate a stochastic frontier cost function and an inefficiency effects model in the analysis of the primary health care services purchased by the public authority and supplied by 180 providers in 1996 in Catalonia. The evidence from our sample does not support the premise that contracting out has helped improve purchasing cost efficiency in primary care. Inefficient purchasing cost was observed in the component of this purchasing cost explicitly included in the contract between purchaser and provider. There are no observable incentives for the contracted-out primary health care teams to minimise prescription costs, which are not explicitly included in the present contracting system