Efficiency estimates of health care systems

There is ample evidence of widespread inefficiency in health care systems. This paper aims to estimate relative efficiency of health care systems across all EU countries. The paper uses a comprehensive battery of models with different combinations of input and output variables. Outputs are the commonly reported health outcome indicators, such as life expectancy, healthy life expectancy and amenable mortality rates. Inputs include (per capita) expenditure on health care, physical inputs and environmental variables. Results obtained in this paper are in line with previous empirical research. On average in the EU, life expectancy at birth could be increased by 2.3% or 1.8 years, when moving from current positions to the efficiency frontier. Specifically, the Czech Republic, Lithuania and Slovakia have the lowest efficiency scores in most of the models used. Hungary, Latvia, Poland and Estonia, although scoring marginally better than the previous group are also underperformers. Belgium, Cyprus, Spain, France, Italy, Sweden and the Netherlands consistently score among the top seven performers in most of the models. JEL Classification: I12, I18, C51.