Does Rapid and Sustained Economic Growth Lead to Convergence in Health Resources: The Case of China From 1980 to 2010

Liang, Di; Zhang, Donglan; Huang, Jiayan; Schweitzer, Stuart

Indicators at the provincial level are selected to measure health system performance according to Donabedian's typology. Seven health indicators are chosen according to the relevance, precision, and accessibility of the data. The definition and available years of data for each variable are listed in Table 1 . Structure indicators include beds per 1000 people and physicians per 1000 people. These two structure indicators reflect the direct input of resources available for the health system. Process indicators include outpatient visits, hospital admissions, bed occupancy rate, and average length of stay (LOS) in hospitals, reflecting the utilization of outpatient and inpatient services. Maternal mortality rate is the single outcome indicator in our analysis. Maternal mortality is an appropriate indicator to be included in the study because it has been the focus of China's health services system for many years. Other outcome measures such as infant mortality and life expectancy at birth would have been desirable to use as well, but these data are only collected in China's decennial census. Hence, they are excluded from the analysis as they are only reported in 3 years during the past 30 years.