Exploring hospital efficiency within and between Italian regions: new empirical evidence

Abstract

This paper investigates the efficiency of Italian hospitals and how their performances have changed over the years 2007–2016, characterized by the great economic recession and budget constraints. We apply the Benefit of Doubt (BoD) approach to determine a composite index that considers the multi-dimensionality of the hospital outcome to be used as main output in a metafrontier production function based on a stochastic frontier framework. The efficiency score distribution is then used to construct a Theil index in order to compare, over time, the inequality of the estimated efficiency between hospitals, both within and between regions. The main findings show that the primary source of inefficiency comes from managerial inefficiency especially for hospitals located in southern regions. A clear and persistent North-South gap in efficiency performances of hospitals has been found along with an increase in the inequality in terms of efficiency between the areas of the country mostly determined by between region inequality.

Life satisfaction in the time of COVID-19. The frog effect

“…Apart from their different geographical locations and size, they differ in cultural and historical attributes, together with some major social and economic factors, as indicated in Table 1. They also differ in term of organisation and quality of healthcare services (Cicchetti & Gasbarrini, 2016;OECD, 2015), with an evident and persistent regional gap, especially between Northern and Southern regions, in the performances of hospitals (Barra et al, 2022). Notwithstanding, no relevant difference can be detected with respect to the effects of COVID-19 in Tuscany and Campania (Blangiardo et al, 2020).…”

Resource misallocation and market inefficiency: Investigating the healthcare sector when considering undesirable output

“…Therefore, it is important to identify the potential ways to further restructure the sector in order to boost its productivity. The paper applies data envelopment analysis which is a popular tool for assessing efficiency of the healthcare systems (Barra et al, 2022). This contribution applies the improved DEA framework for analysis of the variablespecific structural efficiency to propose the directions and extents for re-allocation within the Chinese healthcare system.…”