Health Care Expenditure and Income: a Global Perspective

Abstrac

The impact of air pollution on hospital admissions: Evidence from Italy

In this paper we study the impact of air pollution on hospital admissions for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease for 103 Italian provinces, over the period from 2004 to 2009. We use information on annual mean concentrations of carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter, and ozone measured at monitoring station level to build province-level indicators of pollution. Hence, we estimate a regression model for hospital admissions, where we allow our aggregate measures of pollution to be subject to measurement error and correlated with the error term. We also adopt standard errors for estimates that are robust to serial and spatial correlation in the error term, to allow for temporal persistence and geographical concentration of unobservable risk factors.We find that higher levels of particulate matter are associated with higher levels of hospitalisation for children, while ozone plays an important role in explaining hospital admissions of the elderly. Other factors that appear to have an effect on hospital admissions for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are precipitation and provincial unemployment rate

Sulle relazioni tra dimensione, ambiente e performance finanziaria dei comuni italiani

Nel presente lavoro la dimensione dei comuni italiani non è posta in relazione all’efficienza bensì alla performance finanziaria. L'analisi proposta si svolge in due stadi. Nel primo, si utilizza un approccio di valutazione multi-criteriale (Ishizaka e Nemery, 2013; Greco et al., 2016) combinando le tecniche introdotte da Cohen et al. (2012) e Galariotis et al. (2016), al fine di indagare le performance finanziarie dei comuni italiani utilizzando gli indicatori finanziari ISTAT (2019). In particolare, si è seguito lo stesso approccio già adottato in Paradiso et al. (2019), al quale si rimanda per una diffusa esposizione, ma modificato per consentire l’analisi specifica della dimensione demografica dei comuni. Nel secondo stadio (esplicativo), gli indici ottenuti dal primo stadio sono stati analizzati per ottenere informazioni sulle relazioni strutturali tra le performance finanziarie e diversi fattori ambientali (interni ed esterni) che caratterizzano i comuni italiani. In particolare, sono stati considerati sia specifici fattori interni riconducibili al contesto politico-istituzionale, sia fattori esterni riconducibili al contesto socio-economico, incidenti sulle performance finanziarie dei comuni

Measuring health inequality in US: a composite index approach

In this paper, we use the standardized mortality rates for 21 mutual exclusive causes of death to propose a composite index of US county-level health performances in 1980–2014 interval. We aggregate mortality rates by the stochastic multi-criteria acceptability analysis (SMAA), in order to avoid any a priori judgement on the importance given to a specific cause of death. The total observed inequality among counties is then decomposed to estimate the variability between and within states by means of the Theil index on SMAA outcomes. On average, there has been a decrease in the Composite Index of mortality from 1980 to 2014, but while the majority of counties had an increase in health conditions, some counties have shown a decrease in health performances in the same interval. This may be the reason of a persistent increase of total inequality among counties, with inequality within states constantly higher than inequality between states, both responsible of the growing inequality levels of health performances in the period analysed