BACKGROUND Private-sector retail drug outlets are often the first point of contact for common health ailments, including tuberculosis (TB). Systematic reviews on public-private mix (PPM) interventions for TB did not perform in-depth reviews specifically on engaging retail drug outlets and related stakeholders in the pharmaceutical sector. Our objective was to better understand the extent to whi...

The focus of this paper is on the trade-off between cost efficiency and access in the choice of the optimal mix of public and private provision in universal health systems. We model a simple health care market in which the regulator acts as a third payer. Patients need one unit of medical service and differ in the severity of illness. A private and a public hospital are available. The private m...

The provision and financing of health care are basic issues that every country must address. In principle, a country's health care can be both provided and financed either entirely publicly, or entirely privately (including by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)). Indeed, private provision of health care is attractive because it reduces the government's fiscal burden, and because it may encour...

In contrast to many European countries, UK pension policy has long sought to preserve private pension provision, initially through the promotion of occupational pension schemes and more recently with the development of state-sponsored personal pensions. This paper examines the record theoretically, historically and comparatively. It argues first, that arguments favouring public choice as the ba...

This paper discusses part of the results obtained from a study carried out in two cities of the so-called ABCD Paulista Region in the period 2010-2012, in an attempt to spot the existence of non-state regulatory rationale towards access and consumption of health care services. The first stage includes interviews carried out with strategic stakeholders (managers and politicians) and key workers ...

This paper uses a difference-in-difference style estimation strategy to test separately the impact of competition from public sector and private sector hospitals on the efficiency of public hospitals. Our identification strategy takes advantage of the phased introduction of a recent set of substantive reforms introduced in the English NHS from 2006 onwards. These reforms forced public sector he...

MIXes are a means of untraceable communication based on a public key cryptosystem, as published by David Chaum in 1981 (CACM 24/2, 84-88) (=[6]). In the case where RSA is used as this cryptosystem directly, i.e. without composition with other functions (e.g. destroying the multiplicative structure), we show how the resulting MIXes can be broken by an active attack which is perfectly feasible in...

Many countries today have large inefficient public sector that are producing goods and services that could be bought from non-governmental providers. These countries could benefit from greater private sector participation both factor markets (production of inputs) and product markets (provision of services). Moving from a public sector monopoly to a more effective balance between public and pri...