Healthcare systems comparison

Over at healthcare-economist.com Jason Shafrin is doing a series of posts describing the healthcare systems of several developed nations. You can always learn about the different national approaches on your own, but it's useful to have these summaries all in one place.

The main lesson that the reader will pick up is that actually there are a lot of different models, contradicting the settled notion that the Americans do it one way and the rest of the developed nations do it the other way (namely, the good one).

So far, Jason has published the profiles for the healthcare systems of France, Italy, Spain and Japan. Of these, I think the French and Japanese ones make the most sense. The Japanese model is somewhat cheaper than the French one, but we have to take into account that many external factors also contribute to define a nation's healthcare expense (lifestyle and culture, legal frameworks...). I'm looking forward for the Switzerland installment.

If you are interested in this topic, I recommend this paper by Michael Tanner at the Cato Institute. After that, you can help yourself with the hundreds of posts about healthcare economics at Econlib. There you'll find, for example, this sound critic of the WHO health rankings by Arnold Kling:

Almost two-thirds of the weight in the WHO index goes to these distributional factors. They focus more on inequality than on the absolute level of care received by the poor. In fact, if you dig deeply, what WHO is really measuring is not even inequality in terms of health services but just plain income inequality. Just having very rich people per se is enough to lower the quality of our health care system, according to WHO's methodology.

Measuring Innovation

Innovation is one of the basic foundations of any dynamic economy. The (current) problem with the concept of innovation is that its own relevancy has rendered the term almost meaningless. Innovation has become just another management (and government) buzz-word, a fad. It is thus essential, if we are to manage innovation efficiently and define sound policies to foster it, that we can agree on what we are talking about and, more to the point, how to measure it.

On the terminology side of that effort, we have initiatives like the Spanish UNE-166000 set of standards that aim to define concepts and approaches related to innovation, innovative projects and innovation management systems. The basic framework is closely related to that of other management standards like the ISO 9000 for quality management systems or the ISO 14000 for environmental management systems.

So far so good but, more than delimiting which are the processes that we will refer to as innovations, what we really need to learn is how to measure their outcomes and results. This is in no way an easy task, because the innovative process permeates all the levels and sectors of a modern economy. Economists frequently use Total Factor Productivity (pdf) as the best measure to estimate the impact of innovation, but it hasn't been established in any meaningful way that every increment in TFP is attributable to innovation. Innovation diffusion, crucially, has an important effect in TFP without any new innovation taking place. Determining what are the subjacent causes for increases in worker productivity isn't exactly straightfoward.

Nonetheless, some efforts are being undertaken in this field. The most thorough one that I know of is this one: Measuring Innovation in the 21st Century Economy. It's been produced by the U.S. Department of Commerce and with the participation of some industry heavyweights (like the CEOs of Microsoft, IBM, Medtronics...). The report is really insightful and I strongly recommend reading it for anyone interested in innovation policies and metrics, but don't expect it to ultimately clear all the blurry parts of the innovation picture.

If what you want to measure is the volume and activities of the innovative process, instead of its ultimate efect on the economy, the best reference I know of is the OECD Oslo Manual. It's a must read.

(Thanks to orgtheory.net)