African Traditional Healers: Incentives and Skill in Health Care Delivery
Discussion Paper No. 9798-13
32 Pages Posted: 18 Nov 1998
Date Written: February 1998
Abstract
The benefit of health care comes not just from the ability of health care providers to produce health but from their motivation to do so as well. The fact that traditional healers in Africa are paid on the basis of health outcomes not services provided changes the incentives they face compared to those of modern health care providers. This paper documents these payment methods in Cameroun and explores the different incentives faced by practitioners in government and church-based facilities as well as traditional healers. To test whether such incentives make a difference in the provision of health care I use a multinomial logit analysis of an original data set from Cameroun on patients' choice of provider and show that patients choose practitioners as if they were aware of the difference in incentives. Thus, though patients cannot perfectly evaluate the quality of health they receive or would have received, they can evaluate expected quality by examining incentives.
JEL Classification: D8, I1
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
Money for Nothing: The Dire Straits of Medical Practice in Delhi, India
By Jishnu Das and Jeffrey S. Hammer
-
Strained Mercy: The Quality of Medical Care in Delhi
By Jishnu Das and Jeffrey S. Hammer
-
Short But Not Sweet: New Evidence on Short Duration Morbidities from India
-
African Traditional Healers and Outcome--Contingent Contracts in Health Care
-
Which Doctor? Combining Vignettes and Item Response to Measure Doctor Quality
By Jishnu Das and Jeffrey S. Hammer
-
The Quality of Medical Advice in Low-Income Countries
By Jishnu Das, Jeffrey S. Hammer, ...
-
Asymmetric Information and the Role of Ngos in African Health Care
-
The Effect of Mental Distress on Income: Results from a Community Survey
By Richard G. Frank and Paul J. Gertler