COMPARISON OF HEALTHCARE SYSTEM PERFORMANCES IN OECD COUNTRIES

Abstract

Health spending is increasing every day around the world. Because of this, efficient use of resources becomes more important. The aim of this study was to compare the health efficiencies of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. In order to consider the trend of efficiency of the countries in the observed period (2014-2018), window analysis is chosen as the most appropriate input oriented data envelopment analysis (DEA) technique. The DEA window method was chosen since it leads to increased discrimination on findings and it enables year-by-year comparisons of the results. Input and output variables used in the study were determined by examining other studies in the literature. In this respect, the input variables were identified as the number of physicians per thousand people, the number of nurses per thousand people, the number of hospital beds per thousand people, health spendings (% of GDP); and output variables were expected life expectancy at birth, and rate of surviving infants. According to the results of the DEA Window analysis, only Mexico was found to be efficient. Other countries with an efficiency score of more than 90% are Turkey (0.999), Japan (0.991), Korea (0.974), Luxembourg (0.937). On the other hand; Austria (0.591), Switzerland (0.545) and Germany (0.511) were the last countries in the efficiency score ranking. In these countries, which produce high health output, their inputs are also high, so they are at the end of the ranking of efficiency scores.