OWNERSHIP VERSUS EFFICIENCY: A CROSS-COUNTRY COMPARATION OF HEALTH SYSTEMS

Introducing market mechanisms to the health systems of transition countries in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe (CESEE) after 1990, has not met expectations and the biggest changes are yet to come. The main objectives of this paper are to compare health systems’ efficiency of CESEE countries and in the second stage to analyze whether the different ownership of health care providers is associated with the health system efficiency. Therefore, the relative technical efficiency of decision making units (DMUs), i.e. health system in CESEE countries, is obtained from the BCC model using data envelopment analysis (DEA) technique. The analysis of efficiency level of health systems in CESEE countries offers valuable information on possibilities for improving the efficiency. Furthermore, analyzing the impact of different ownership of health care providers on the efficiency is an important step towards improvement of the health system, on the basis of which it is possible to define the desired state as well as the way to achieve it