Henry Asante Antwi

The effect of herd formation among healthcare investors on health sector growth in China

BackgroundChina has become the world‘s second largest healthcare market based on a recent report by the World Health Organization. Eventhough China achieved universal health insurance coverage in 2011, representing the largest expansion of insurance coverage in human history achieved; health inequality remains endemic in China. Lessons from the effect of market crisis on health equity in Europe and other places has reignited interest in exploring the potential healthcare market aberrations that can trigger distributive injustice in healthcare resource allocation among China’s provinces. Recently, many healthcare investors in China have become more concerned about capital preservation, and are responding by abandoning long term investments strategies in healthcare. This investment withdrawal en mass is perceived to be influenced by herding tendencies and can trigger or consolidate endemic health inequality.MethodsOur study simultaneously employs four testing models (two state spaced models and two return dispersion models) to establish the existence of procyclical (herding) behavior among the stocks and its health equity implications. These are applied to a large set of data to compare and contrast results of herd formation among investors in fourteen healthcare sectors in China.ResultsThe study reveals that apart from the cross sectional standard deviation (CSSD) model, the remaining two models and our augmented state space model yields significant evidence of herding in all subsectors of the healthcare market. We also find that the herding effect is more prominent during down movements of the market.ConclusionHerding behavior may lead to contemporaneous loss of investor confidence and capital withdrawal and thereby deprive the healthcare sector of the much needed capital for expansion. Thus there may be obvious delay in efforts to bridge the gap in access to healthcare facilities, medical support services, medical supplies, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, diagnostic substances, medical laboratory and advanced medical equipment across China. Moreover, a potential crash in the healthcare market is possible in the healthcare sector as a result of persistent herding tendencies among investors and that may have more damaging consequences for health inequality in China.

Towards an equitable healthcare in China: evaluating the productive efficiency of community health centers in Jiangsu Province

BackgroundWhile the demand for the health service keeps escalating at the grass root or rural areas of China, a substantial portion of healthcare resources remains stagnant in the more developed cities and this has entrenched health inequity in many parts of China. At its conception, the Deepening Health Care Reform in 2012 China was intended to flush out these discrepancies and promote a more equitable and efficient distribution of health resources. Nearly half a decade of this reform, there are uncertainties as to whether the attainment of the objectives of the reform is in sight.MethodsWe divided Jiangsu Province into 3 zones according to the level of economic and social development i.e. developed, developing, and undeveloped areas. Using a hybrid of Panel data analysis and an augmented Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), we model human resources, capital inputs of Community Health Centers to comprehensively determine the technical and scale efficiency of community health resources in 3 zones in Jiangsu Province.ResultsWe sampled data and analysed efficiency and productivity growth of 75 Community Health Centers in 13 cities of Jiangsu Province from 2011 to 2015, which shows that a significant productive growth among Community Health Centers between 2011 and 2015. Mirroring the behavior of Community Health Centers, technological progress was the underlying force for the growth and the deterioration in efficiency change was found. This can be credited partly to the Deepening Health Care Reform measures aimed at improving technology availability in health centers in sub-urban areas. The regional summary of the DEA result shows that the stage of economic development and the efficiency performance of hospital did not necessarily go hand in hand among the 3 zones of Jiangsu.ConclusionsThe government of China in general and Jiangsu province in particular could improve the efficiency of health resources allocation by improving the community health service system, rationalizing the allocation of health personnel, optimizing the allocation of material resources and enhancing the level of health of financial resources allocation.

Evaluation of health resource utilization efficiency in community health centers of Jiangsu Province, China

BackgroundWhile the demand for health services keep escalating at the grass roots or rural areas of China, a substantial portion of healthcare resources remain stagnant in the more developed cities and this has entrenched health inequity in many parts of China. At its conception, China’s Deepen Medical Reform started in 2012 was intended to flush out possible disparities and promote a more equitable and efficient distribution of healthcare resources. Nearly half a decade of this reform, there are uncertainties as to whether the attainment of the objectives of the reform is in sight.MethodsUsing a hybrid of panel data analysis and an augmented data envelopment analysis (DEA), we model human resources, material, finance to determine their technical and scale efficiency to comprehensively evaluate the transverse and longitudinal allocation efficiency of community health resources in Jiangsu Province.ResultsWe observed that the Deepen Medical Reform in China has led to an increase concern to ensure efficient allocation of community health resources by health policy makers in the province. This has led to greater efficiency in health resource allocation in Jiangsu in general but serious regional or municipal disparities still exist. Using the DEA model, we note that the output from the Community Health Centers does not commensurate with the substantial resources (human resources, materials, and financial) invested in them. We further observe that the case is worst in less-developed Northern parts of Jiangsu Province.ConclusionsThe government of Jiangsu Province could improve the efficiency of health resource allocation by improving the community health service system, rationalizing the allocation of health personnel, optimizing the allocation of material resources, and enhancing the level of health of financial resource allocation.

Assessing China's Rural Reform Programs and the Lessons for Africa's Agriculture Development. A Review

Since the 2008 global financial crisis, many African governments are now turning to China for the much needed loans and technical expertise to undertake developmental projects. Meanwhile China and Africa exhibited similar socio-economic conditions some three decades ago; high poverty rates and agrarian dominated economies with very low per capita incomes. However, in the past few years, even as Africa remains at the bottom of global economic rankings, China is progressively emerging as the world’s economic powerhouse. This paper examines the literature on how China’s rural reforms program facilitated the country’s fast economic transformation. The reforms process brought about institutional reforms that brought immense changes in the agriculture sector. The institutional reforms led to an increase in public investment in the area of R & D, irrigation, rural education, road, and electricity, which contributed to the growth in agricultural productivity and rural poverty reduction. It is these interventions brought in by the reforms that resulted in the miracle growth experienced by China.

The Impact of Privatisation of Healthcare Equipment and Technology SOEs on Productivity in Africa

Upon the attainment of independence many African countries emerged with a new spirit of entrepreneurial governance and domestic industrialization. However with time, most of the state owned enterprises (SOEs) set up have been privatized largely because of mismanagement, huge deficits and operational inefficiencies created by many factors. In all material moments, the objective of divesture of SOEs was to stimulate efficiency, productivity and relieve the state of the huge financial burden they bring. Our study examines the methods of privatization of healthcare technology and equipment SOEs in Africa and their impact on post-divestiture productivity based on cases from Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania and Kenya.We simultaneously collect and model privatization data from International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank relating to Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania and Kenya. These were data submitted to the IMF and World Bank as part of the measures to implement the different forms of economic recovery and structural adjustment programs in the respective countries. Our empirical strategy follows the broader literature in estimating reduced form equations for firm performance as a function of ownership, while trying to account for potential problems of heterogeneity (observed and unobserved) and simultaneity bias. We note the insider/employee shareholding accounted for only 23.6 percent of privatization of healthcare equipments and technology manufacturing enterprises on average while mass privatization program accounts for 18.2 percent of the privatization mode. We note that each of these methods yield positive post divestiture labour productivity. However privatization of healthcare equipment and technology manufacturing enterprises by block sale to outside investors generated the highest form of labour productivity.

Forecasting Optimal Solar Energy Supply in Jiangsu Province (China): A Systematic Approach Using Hybrid of Weather and Energy Forecast Models

The idea of aggregating information is clearly recognizable in the daily lives of all entities whether as individuals or as a group, since time immemorial corporate organizations, governments, and individuals as economic agents aggregate information to formulate decisions. Energy planning represents an investment-decision problem where information needs to be aggregated from credible sources to predict both demand and supply of energy. To do this there are varying methods ranging from the use of portfolio theory to managing risk and maximizing portfolio performance under a variety of unpredictable economic outcomes. The future demand for energy and need to use solar energy in order to avoid future energy crisis in Jiangsu province in China require energy planners in the province to abandon their reliance on traditional, “least-cost,” and stand-alone technology cost estimates and instead evaluate conventional and renewable energy supply on the basis of a hybrid of optimization models in order to ensure effective and reliable supply. Our task in this research is to propose measures towards addressing optimal solar energy forecasting by employing a systematic optimization approach based on a hybrid of weather and energy forecast models. After giving an overview of the sustainable energy issues in China, we have reviewed and classified the various models that existing studies have used to predict the influences of the weather influences and the output of solar energy production units. Further, we evaluate the performance of an exemplary ensemble model which combines the forecast output of two popular statistical prediction methods using a dynamic weighting factor.