OBJECTIVES This article examines changes in household spending on health care between 1978 and 1998. It also provides a detailed look at household spending on health care in 1998. DATA SOURCES Data on household spending are from Statistics Canada's Family Expenditure Survey for survey years between 1978 and 1996, and from the annual Survey of Household Spending for 1997 and 1998. ANALYTICAL...

Compact e-cash schemes allow a user to withdraw a wallet containing k coins in a single operation, each of which the user can spend unlinkably. One big open problem for compact e-cash is to allow multiple denominations of coins to be spent efficiently without executing the spend protocol a number of times. In this paper, we give a (partial) solution to this open problem by introducing two addit...

Firms’ spending on R&D, advertising, and inventory holding affect firm performance, which in turn affects future spending in each of these three areas. Effective allocation of resources across R&D, advertising, and inventory holding is challenging since an understanding of their dynamic inter-relationships is necessary. Past research has not examined these spending issues simultaneously. We est...

This study analyses government capital and recurrent spending outlays on sectors (education, health, defense agriculture and transport and communication) believed to be critical to the growth of the economy, for the period 1980 to 2014. The Error Correction Method was adopted to analyze the short-run impact of each spending division on the prosperity of the economy. The disaggregation into capi...

Healthcare spending varies widely across markets, and previous empirical studies find little evidence that higher spending translates into better health outcomes. The main innovation in this paper exploits this cross-sectional variation in hospital spending in a new way by considering patients who are exposed to healthcare systems not designed for them: patients far from home when a health emer...

According to data from the most recent edition of the Canadian Rx Atlas, Quebec was the province with the highest total spending per capita on prescription drugs. The difference between Quebec and the rest of Canada was 35%, which translates into $1.5 billion dollars of extra spending. This analysis explores the economic cost drivers of the higher level of pharmaceutical spending in Quebec. Whi...

We develop a model of pork-barrel politics in which a government offi cial tries to improve her re-election chances by spending on targeted interest groups. The spending signals that she shares their concerns. We investigate the effect of such pandering on the public deficit. Pandering makes the deficit worse if either the offi cial’s overall spending propensity is known, or if it is unknown bu...

In quantifying the impact of insurance on health care demand, most quasiexperimental studies focus on mean spending and consumption, which, considering the highly-skewed shapes of spending and consumption, potentially hides important information about how insurance is related to health care demand. This paper, by contrast, examines the entire distribution of health care demand. To address insur...

Patterns of spending for health during 1986 and beyond reflect a mixture of adherence to and change from historical trends. From a level of $458 billion in 1986--10.9 percent of the GNP--national health expenditures are projected to reach $1.5 trillion by the year 2000--15.0 percent of the GNP. This article presents a provisional estimate of spending in 1986 and projections of spending (under t...

We examined out-of-pocket medical spending by persons with and without chronic conditions using data from the 1996 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS). Our results show that mean out-of-pocket spending increased with the number of chronic conditions. The level of this spending also varied by age and insurance coverage, among other characteristics. Out-of-pocket spending for prescription dru...