Revisiting the health systems of OECD countries toward an efficiency perspective

Abstract

Introduction There has been a remarkable rise in total health expenditures as a share of GDP since 1960 which corresponds to an increase from 4% to 9% in ten-year averages (Varol Iyidogan et al., 2017). As emphasized by Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development-OECD (2017), in 2016, OECD health spending has reached a maximum rise since 2009 by 3.4 %, on average. The upward trend of health care expenditures as a consequence of aging, technological grounds, growth performance and other socio-economic factors among OECD counties arises the issue of efficiency which is a common matter of debate, not only for major research areas of economics with regard to the constraints on resources leading to optimization problems, but also for health sector. Following the definition of efficiency in the production literature which is either the achievement to possible maximum output with a given input or production of given amount of output with minimum input, an efficient health system requires a substantial improvement in outcome as a consequence of growing health expenditures. From this point of view, the related literature focuses on the measurement of health efficiency by utilizing different approaches, both parametric such as Evans et al. (2000), Jayasuriya and Wodon (2003), Kinfu (2011), Grigoli and Kapsoli (2013), and non-parametric that embodies data envelopment analysis (DEA) and free disposal hull (FDH). A summary table on the studies implementing non-parametric methods is presented in Tab. 1. © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Berlin 2019.