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Regional Quantity, Productivity and Efficiency Measures of the Swiss Health Care System

Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics volume 144, pages 459–476 (2008)Cite this article

Summary

In Switzerland, there are substantial cantonal differences in per capita cost of the mandatory health care system. The present paper breaks these differences down into price and quantity effects revealing both, a large quantity and a somewhat smaller price variance across cantons. As a statistical fact, a positive correlation of price and quantity index results.

Dividing the inferred quantity output index by a corresponding input index yields a measure of total factor productivity. While the canton of Zurich exhibits the highest productivity, the measures in Geneva, Neuchâtel, Berne and Vaud are far below average.

Finally, a data envelopment analysis of hospital services shows little evidence for variable returns to scale implying that low productivities are, for the most part, due to pure technological slacks.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Winterthur, Switzerland

    Reto Schleiniger

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  1. Reto Schleiniger
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I am grateful to Jonas Blöchliger for the professional data handling.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Schleiniger, R. Regional Quantity, Productivity and Efficiency Measures of the Swiss Health Care System. Swiss J Economics Statistics 144, 459–476 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03399262

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