|
5. TYPES OF HEALTH ACCOUNTS
Principles and analytical use
The SHA revision aims, amongst other things, to create a statistical framework which enables policy analysis of the health sector and to strengthen the linkages between SNA and SHA. In achieving these objectives, an effort should be put into linking the health sector to the main macroeconomic variables that comprise aggregate demand and supply. These are value added (GDP), consumption, investment, import and export. If the corresponding aggregates could be estimated for the health sector, it would then be possible to analyse the relative importance of the health sector in terms of contribution to the whole economy (i.e. the relative importance of consumption of health good and services in relation to total household final consumption or to actual consumption) and also to what extent the health sector is internationally integrated. At the same time, it could be of interest to analyse the importance of the health sector in terms of income generated, specifically health sector value added as a percentage of GDP.
Key issues
One of the themes in this unit is to identify a set of accounts which include balancing items (i.e. value added, operating surplus, disposable income, saving and net lending/net borrowing). Balancing items are not simply devices introduced to ensure that accounts balance as they encapsulate a great deal of information. The set of accounts which will be identified in this unit will be determined by policy usefulness, however it may comprise:
-
Accounts of production of health services.
-
Generation of income accounts.
-
Accounts of final use (final consumption) of health services.
-
Sectoral accounts (uses and resources for each main health financing category).
-
Accounts of gross capital formation in the health sector.
-
Accounts of international trade in health care.
-
Supply and use tables.
-
Capital account
|
