Tag Archives: OECD
Health Spending Numbers: An Update on the Long-Term
It is of course useful from time to time to take a look at the longer-term picture when it comes to health spending especially given that there is a slowdown in health expenditure growth. Figure 1 plots per capita total health expenditure in US PPP dollars from 1960 to 2014 for Canada (to 2014) and […]
Federations and Health Care Spending
In putting together my material for my fiscal federalism course next term, I decided to take a look at some health spending figures for the OECD countries in order to compare federal with non-federal countries. Federal structures generally try to combine the economic advantages of a more centralized state with some of the welfare and […]
Physicians and Workload: A Very Simple International Comparison
The Canadian Medical Association has been having its annual meetings this week in Ottawa and in honor of the event, let me put out another international comparison on physicians using data from the OECD Health Statistics 2013. The first chart (Figure 1) is a basic resource availability measure showing the number of physicians per 1000 […]
Economic Inequality, Saving and Economic Growth
“It is generally recognized that more saving takes place in communities in which the distribution of wealth is uneven than in those in which it approaches more closely to modern conceptions of what is just.” T.S. Ashton (1948) The Industrial Revolution 1760-1830, p. 7. I came across this quote while reading Ashton’s account of the […]
Living Longer…and Longer….
The OECD Health Data 2013 final update numbers are out and for the first time average life expectancy at birth in the OECD countries (numbers for 2011) exceeds 80 years at 80.1. This represents a gain of ten years since 1970. When life expectancy for men and women at age 65 is examined, there are […]
Are More Physicians Preferred to Less?
Physician spending has been highlighted as one of the fastest growing expenditure categories in Canadian health care spending. The increase in supply of physicians, rising fees and the increasing utilization of health care per capita are recognized as important and intertwined factors driving expenditure for physician services. Despite perceptions of a shortage of physicians, the […]
Government Spending and Crime
I’ve been doing some data exploration on public sector spending and societal outcomes and have some preliminary results that have caused me to puzzle about what they might mean. I’ve been looking at annual data for OECD countries (33 countries) over the period 2000 to 2010 and the relationship between public sector size and crime […]
Value for Money in Health
The Conference Board is having a Summit on Sustainable Health and Health Care October 30th and 31st in Toronto featuring a plethora of media, industry, health service and academic experts who will focus on the need to refocus the health system “from treating acute illness to preventing and managing chronic disease so governments, healthcare leaders […]
Ranking Employment Performance
It has been the conventional wisdom in Canada that we have weathered the Great Recession and the financial crisis much better than the rest of the world. Ever wonder why when government comparisons are made about how Canada fared during the Great Recession, the comparison made is inevitably with the G-7 countries?
Health Outcomes & Health Financing: An Example
I finally got around to looking at the OECD Health Data release for 2011 and as is my habit, I spend some time looking at the overview reports and charts as well as playing around with some of the data. The first chart provided by the OECD that I want to draw your attention to […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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