The World Health Survey (WHS) which has been implemented in more than 70 countries with standardized questionnaires opens a great opportunity for research on health care financing issues. This study examines the household expenditures and health expenditure collected in the WHS in terms of reliability, consistency between different ways of data collection within the survey and with other types of household surveys. Data used in this study include 50 WHS and 37 other type of surveys, namely the Living Standard Measurement Survey, Household Budget Survey and Income and Expenditure Survey. The analysis consists of comparison of test-retest results; the aggregated and reported total household expenditure and health expenditure; the expenditures from the WHS and other type of surveys. The results from test-retest are fairly similar in the WHS. For health expenditure the average of reported total is lower than the aggregated total while for household total expenditure the estimate is similar from the two measures. Finally the WHS was found to report lower total household expenditure but higher out-of-pocket expenditure comparing with other types of surveys. The study suggests further efforts to standardize the questions in collecting expenditure data in household surveys for the purpose of cross-country and over time comparison.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Publisher Info
Article provided by Elsevier in its journal Health Policy.
Volume (Year): 91 (2009) Issue (Month): 3 (August) Pages: 297-305 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
(with abstract),
plain text
(with abstract),
BibTeX,
RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite),
ReDIF