The impact of decentralisation on the performance of health care systems

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between the degree of administrative decentralisation across levels of government in health care decision-making and health care spending, life expectancy as well as hospital costs. This empirical analysis builds on previous analytical research carried out by the OECD (Lorenzoni, Murtin et al., 2018; Lorenzoni and Marino, 2017), both of which established new methodological tools to analyse health sector performance. The present analysis extends this framework to examine the impact of centralisation versus decentralisation of responsibilities across levels of government, making use of newly collected data on governance and expenditure assignment, as well as non-linear empirical specifications.