Publication: Health Equity and Financial Protection in Ghana
Loading...
Published
2012-05-21
ISSN
Date
2017-06-13
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
The health equity and financial protection reports are short country-specific volumes that provide a picture of equity and financial protection in the health sectors of low-and middle-income countries. Topics covered include: inequalities in health outcomes, health behavior and health care utilization; benefit incidence analysis; financial protection; and the progressivity of health care financing. Ghana's government is committed to improving equity and financial protection in the health sector. In 2005, the Government of Ghana amended its growth and poverty reduction strategy report to include a new target in the country's development: to reach middle income status by the year 2015 (Republic of Ghana 2005). Ghana's Minister of health has called attention to the role that health plays in economic development and has placed equity in both access and delivery of health services as a top priority for reaching middle income status (Ministry of health 2007). Ghana spends 8.1 per cent (2009) of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health. This is greater than the spending levels in other lower middle-income countries in Africa, which spend an average of 5.8 per cent (2009) of their GDP on health. Ghana provides free health services for certain vulnerable groups, such as children under five, people over 70, and pregnant women. In addition, immunization and services to combat certain communicable diseases are provided free of charge.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“World Bank. 2012. Health Equity and Financial Protection in Ghana. Health Equity and Financial Protection Report;. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/27067 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Digital Object Identifier
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Health Equity and Financial Protection in Vietnam(Washington, DC, 2012-05-18)This report analyzes equity and financial protection in the health sector of Vietnam. In particular, it examines inequalities in health outcomes, health behavior and health care utilization; benefit incidence analysis; financial protection; and the progressivity of health care financing. Data are drawn from the 1992-93 and 1997-98 Vietnam living standards survey, the 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2008 Vietnam household and living standards survey, the 2002 Vietnam demographic and health survey, the 2002 Vietnam world health survey, the 2006 Vietnam multiple indicator cluster survey and the 2006 Vietnam national health accounts. All analyses are conducted using original survey data and employ the health modules of the ADePT software. Overall, health care financing in Vietnam in 2006 was fairly progressive, i.e. the better-off spent a larger fraction of their consumption on health care than the poor. The financing sources that contribute to the overall progressivity of health care finance are general taxation, which finances 27 per cent of domestic spending on health, and out-of-pocket payments, which finance 55 per cent of spending. The most progressive source of health finance is actually Social Health Insurance (SHI) contributions, which is unsurprising given that they are paid largely by formal sector workers who are among the better-off; however, SHI contributions finance just 13 per cent of health spending. Voluntary insurance is mildly regressive, but this finances an even smaller share of total health spending.Publication Health Equity and Financial Protection in Kenya(Washington, DC, 2012-05-21)The health equity and financial protection reports are short country-specific volumes that provide a picture of equity and financial protection in the health sectors of low-and middle-income countries. Topics covered include: inequalities in health outcomes, health behavior and health care utilization; benefit incidence analysis; financial protection; and the progressivity of health care financing. Kenya's government is committed to improving equity and financial protection in health by implementing the Second National Health Sector Strategic Plan (NHSSP II). Kenya spends 4.3 per cent (2009) of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health. This is lower than the average spending levels in other lower income countries in Africa, which spent an average of 6.5 per cent (2009) of their GDP on health. The functions of the health system in Kenya have historically been centralized through top-down decision-making and resource allocations. However, in the past decade Kenya has committed to decentralization of certain core functions to the district level. These include managing the health management system, making resource allocation decisions, and delivering health services. The central government maintains control over the majority of the key functions of the health system including staffing, contracting, and maintaining the national health information system. Kenya has a form of social insurance through the 40 year-old National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF). Employees in the formal sector are compulsorily insured and must make monthly contributions from their wages.Publication Health Equity and Financial Protection in Zambia(Washington, DC, 2012-05-21)This report analyzes equity and financial protection in the health sector of Zambia. In particular, it examines inequalities in health outcomes, health behavior and health care utilization; benefit incidence analysis; financial protection; and the progressivity of health care financing. Data are drawn from the 2007 Zambia demographic and health survey, the 2006 Zambia living conditions monitoring survey, the 2003 Zambia world health survey and the 2003 Zambia national health accounts. All analyses are conducted using original survey data and employ the health modules of the ADePT software. Overall, health care financing in Zambia in 2006 was fairly progressive, i.e. the better-off spent a larger fraction of their consumption on health care than the poor. The financing sources that contribute to the overall progressivity of health care finance are general taxation, which finances 42 per cent of domestic spending on health, and contributions made by private employers, which finance 9 per cent of spending. An additional contribution to overall progressivity is made through pre-payment mechanisms, but this remains fairly limited given that they only represent 1 per cent of total health finance. Out-of-pocket health payments, which account for 47 per cent of total health financing, appear to be proportional to income, with only slight and not statistically significant evidence of progressivity.Publication Health Equity and Financial Protection Report(Washington, DC, 2012-07-23)The health equity and financial protection reports are short country-specific volumes that provide a picture of equity and financial protection in the health sectors of low- and middle-income countries. Topics covered include: inequalities in health outcomes, health behavior and health care utilization; benefit incidence analysis; financial protection; and the progressivity of health care financing. This report analyses equity and financial protection in the health sector of Mongolia. In particular, it examines inequalities in health outcomes and health care utilization; benefit incidence analysis; financial protection; and the progressivity of health care financing. Data are drawn from the 2005 Mongolia multiple indicator cluster survey and the 2007-08 Mongolia household socio-economic survey.Publication Health Equity and Financial Protection in Pakistan(Washington, DC, 2012-05-23)The health equity and financial protection reports are short country-specific volumes that provide a picture of equity and financial protection in the health sectors of low-and middle-income countries. Topics covered include: inequalities in health outcomes, health behavior and health care utilization; benefit incidence analysis; financial protection; and the progressivity of health care financing. Pakistan's government is committed to improving the equity of health outcomes and the ability to offer financial protection in the health sector through the implementation of the National Health Policy. Pakistan spends 2.62 per cent (2009) of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health. This is far lower than the average spending levels in other countries in the South Asia Region, which have spent an average of 5.3 per cent (2009) of their GDP on health.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Shrinking Economic Distance(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-09-19)Despite the reduction in transport costs over the past few decades, creating a single integrated economy remains elusive. Low- and middle-income countries face higher transport prices than high-income countries for both international and domestic shipments, and shipping times are longer and less reliable. Tackling the problem can increase income and general welfare in low- and middle-income countries, improving the lives of the people who live there. “Shrinking Economic Distance: Understanding How Markets and Places Can Lower Transport Costs in Developing Countries” makes a unique contribution by assessing the main determinants of shippers’ economic costs of freight transport—economic distance—and identifying the frictions that keep transport prices above an efficient level, shipping times high, and reliability low. Drawing on new analyses and compiling many others, the book provides important evidence to inform the design of policies to reduce the economic costs of transport and deepen the economic integration of developing countries. This book shows how understanding the frictions driving the economic costs of freight transport can help policy makers target reforms in the areas in which they can have the greatest impact and avoid unintended consequences. It lays out the building blocks for a reform agenda to reduce economic distance, which includes first making markets and then making places efficient. “Shrinking Economic Distance” will be of enormous value to policy makers, practitioners, and academics interested in freight transport and economic integration.Publication Estimation and Inference for Actual and Counterfactual Growth Incidence Curves(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-01)Different episodes of economic growth display widely varying distributional characteristics, both across countries and over time. Growth is sometimes accompanied by rising and sometimes by falling inequality. Applied economists have come to rely on the Growth Incidence Curve, which gives the quantile-specific rate of income growth over a certain period, to describe and analyze the incidence of economic growth. This paper discusses the identification conditions, and develops estimation and inference procedures for both actual and counterfactual growth incidence curves, based on general functions of the quantile potential outcome process over the space of quantiles. The paper establishes the limiting 0 distribution of the test statistics of interest for those general functions, and proposes resampling methods to implement inference in practice. The proposed methods are illustrated by a comparison of the growth processes in the United States and Brazil during 1995-2007. Although growth in the average real wage was disappointing in both countries, the distribution of that growth was markedly different. In the United States, wage growth was mediocre for the bottom 80 percent of the sample, but much more rapid for the top 20 percent. In Brazil, conversely, wage growth was rapid below the median, and negative at the top. As a result, inequality rose in the United States and fell markedly in Brazil.Publication Taxes, Spending, and Equity: International Patterns and Lessons for Developing Countries(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-11-17)Taxes and public spending underpin the basic administration of government and finance the human capital and infrastructure investments needed for economic growth. They can also have a significant and immediate impact on poverty and inequality. The question of how public finance can support longer-term growth objectives while promoting equity has become even more important in recent years, given the high fiscal deficits and debt levels most countries emerged with in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. These included the increasing cost of debt and the need to restart environmentally sustainable growth while helping households address the learning losses and other social scars caused by the pandemic. This paper examines the global evidence on which households pay which taxes and who benefits from what spending, and critically, the net effect on different households across the income distribution. The aim is to identify the patterns and lessons that emerge for designing progressive fiscal policies. A global dataset of 96 countries is assembled, spanning all regions of the world and all national income levels, grounded in the Commitment to Equity (CEQ) approach to fiscal incidence.Publication International Debt Statistics 2019(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-11-13)This year’s edition of International Debt Statistics, successor to Global Development Finance and World Debt Tables, is designed to respond to user demand for timely, comprehensive data on trends in external debt in low- and middle-income countries. The World Bank’s Debtor Reporting System (DRS), from which the aggregate and country tables presented in this report are drawn, was established in 1951. World Debt Tables, the first publication that included DRS external debt data, appeared in 1973 and gained increased attention during the debt crisis of the 1980s. Since then, the publication and data have undergone numerous revisions and iterations to address the challenges and demands posed by the global economic conditions. Presentation of and access to data have been refined to improve the user experience. The online edition of International Debt Statistics 2019 now provides a summary overview and a select set of indicators, while an expanded dataset is available online (datatopics.worldbank.org /debt/ids).Publication Digital Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-13)All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. "Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs" shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing, digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. At the same time, it can support not only countries’ short-term objective of postpandemic economic recovery but also their vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. These outcomes are not automatic, however. Mobile internet availability has increased throughout the continent in recent years, but Africa’s uptake gap is the highest in the world. Areas with at least 3G mobile internet service now cover 84 percent of Africa’s population, but only 22 percent uses such services. And the average African business lags in the use of smartphones and computers as well as more sophisticated digital technologies that catalyze further productivity gains. Two issues explain the usage gap: affordability of these new technologies and willingness to use them. For the 40 percent of Africans below the extreme poverty line, mobile data plans alone would cost one-third of their incomes—in addition to the price of access devices, apps, and electricity. Data plans for small- and medium-size businesses are also more expensive than in other regions. Moreover, shortcomings in the quality of internet services—and in the supply of attractive, skills-appropriate apps that promote entrepreneurship and raise earnings—dampen people’s willingness to use them. For those countries already using these technologies, the development payoffs are significant. New empirical studies for this report add to the rapidly growing evidence that mobile internet availability directly raises enterprise productivity, increases jobs, and reduces poverty throughout Africa. To realize these and other benefits more widely, Africa’s countries must implement complementary and mutually reinforcing policies to strengthen both consumers’ ability to pay and willingness to use digital technologies. These interventions must prioritize productive use to generate large numbers of inclusive jobs in a region poised to benefit from a massive, youthful workforce—one projected to become the world’s largest by the end of this century.