Too Ill to Find the Cure? Corruption, Institutions, and Health Care Sector Performance in the New Democracies of Central and Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Union
Too Ill to Find the Cure? Corruption, Institutions, and Health Care Sector Performance in the New Democracies of Central and Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Union

Summary/Abstract: This article tackles the questions of why some Central and East European countries have been more successful at creating a better-performing health care sector while others left it in decay. To answer this question, the effects of corruption, institutional effectiveness, and level of democratic consolidation are considered regarding the ability of the health care sector to prevent cancer deaths. The tests of the hypotheses through an autoregressive distributed lags model yield a mixed bag of results. First, corruption has a significant increasing short-term effect on cancer mortality in some models and a decreasing effect in models where the alternative measure of corruption is used. These same effects persist over the long term. Institutional effectiveness also has mixed results. However, effective institutions lower cancer mortality in the long term.

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