Assessing the Relative Efficiency of Health Systems in Sub-Saharan Africa Using Data Envelopment Analysis

Samuel Ambapour

doi:10.4236/ajor.2015.51003

Abstract

We assess the relative efficiency of health systems of 35 countries in sub-Saharan Africa using Data Envelopment Analysis. This method allows us to evaluate the ability of each country to transform its sanitary “inputs” into health “outputs”. Our results show that, on average, the health systems of these countries have an efficiency score between 72% and 84% of their maximum level. We also note that education and density of population are factors that affect the efficiency of the health system in these countries.

Highlights

Health is seen as a component of human capital the same way as education and nutritional status [1]-[4]
The purpose of this paper is to shed some more light on this issue that, to our knowledge, has received little attention in the literature. This relative paucity of literature on the subject is associated, according to some authors, to the challenges posed by the comparison of different health systems because, inter alia, of the following reasons: 1) The definition of health proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO) is, according to [8], useless for all practical purposes, “a perfect state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, not just the absence of disease or illness”. 2) There are many measures of health status, especially if we compare individual health indicators, such as “health utilities index” that, as argued by [7], are based on functional capacity concepts rather than on performance
We apply DEA to assess the performance of health systems of 35 countries in sub-Saharan Africa

Summary

Introduction

Health is seen as a component of human capital the same way as education and nutritional status [1]-[4]. The purpose of this paper is to shed some more light on this issue that, to our knowledge, has received little attention in the literature This relative paucity of literature on the subject is associated, according to some authors (for example, [6] or [7]), to the challenges posed by the comparison of different health systems because, inter alia, of the following reasons: 1) The definition of health proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO) is, according to [8], useless for all practical purposes, “a perfect state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, not just the absence of disease or illness”. We consider all hospitals as a single production unit

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion