TY  - JOUR
AU  - Hunt,Jennifer
TI  - Bribery in Health Care in Peru and Uganda
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 13034
PY  - 2007
Y2  - April 2007
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13034
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13034.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Jennifer Hunt
Department of Economics
Rutgers University
New Jersey Hall
75 Hamilton Street
New Brunswick
NJ, 08901-1248
Tel: (732) 932-7363
E-Mail: jennifer.hunt@rutgers.edu
M3  - presented at "Inter-American Seminar on Economics", December 1-2, 2006
AB  - In this paper, I examine the role of household income in determining who bribes and how much they bribe in health care in Peru and Uganda. I find that rich patients are more likely than other patients to bribe in public health care: doubling household consumption increases the bribery probability by 0.2-0.4 percentage points in Peru, compared to a bribery rate of 0.8%; doubling household expenditure in Uganda increases the bribery probability by 1.2 percentage points compared to a bribery rate of 17%. The income elasticity of the bribe amount cannot be precisely estimated in Peru, but is about 0.37 in Uganda. Bribes in the Ugandan public sector appear to be fees-for-service extorted from the richer patients amongst those exempted by government policy from paying the official fees. Bribes in the private sector appear to be flat-rate fees paid by patients who do not pay official fees.  I do not find evidence that the public health care sector in either Peru or Uganda is able to price-discriminate less effectively than public institutions with less competition from the private sector.
ER  -