No.163 Technical Efficiency of Public and Private Hospitals in Vietnam: Do Market-Oriented Policies Matter?

This study examined how ownership and the degree of competition in the market were related to pure technical efficiency, using micro-level hospital data from six regions in Vietnam that were collected by an original survey. According to the results, the provincial hospitals have significantly higher efficiency than the district hospitals, while the private hospitals have significantly lower efficiency than the district hospitals. Moreover, the number of competing hospitals has a statistically significant negative correlation with the efficiency of the hospitals, and so does the number of competing private hospitals. On the other hand, the degree of concentration in the market has no significant correlation with efficiency. Those results may imply that competition raises problems with resource allocation among the hospitals in Vietnam.

Keywords: technical efficiency, ownership, competition, DEA, bootstrap method