Analysis of hospital technical efficiency in China.pdfVIP

China Economic Review 23 2012 865–877 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect China Economic Review Analysis of hospital technical ef?ciency in China: Effect of health insurance reform Hsin-Hui HU a, Qinghui QI a, Chih-Hai YANG b,? a Dalian Medical University, China b National Central University, Taiwan a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Article history: This paper investigates the regional hospital efficiency in China during the 2002–2008 period, Received 11 November 2010 especially for how the health insurance reform of New Rural Cooperative Medical System Received in revised form 8 April 2012 NRCMS impacts on efficiency. Adopting the non-parametric technique of data envelopment Accepted 11 April 2012 analysis DEA to handle the feature of multiple outputs and undesirable outputs in the Available online 20 April 2012 hospital industry, empirical estimates indicate that hospital efficiency is moderate that increased slightly from 0.6777 to 0.8098 during the sample period. However, it ranges widely JEL classification: from 0.396 to 1 across provinces. The regression analysis on examining determinants of I11 efficiency suggests that a higher proportion of for-profit hospital and high quality hospital is I18 helpful to enhance technical efficiency. We find a negative relationship between government I19 subsidy and efficiency for coastal regions. While technical efficiency varies considerable across provinces, there is no significant difference between coastal and non-coastal regions being Keywords: found, after controlling for other variables. Crucially, the medical reform of NRCMS overall has Hospital a significant efficiency-enhancing effect, particularly for non-coastal regions, ceteris paribus. It Efficiency Productivity highlights the effectiveness of NRCMS on promoting medical service accessibility for rural Health insurance