Health at a Glance: Asia/Pacific 2018
Measuring Progress towards Universal Health Coverage
This fifth edition of Health at a Glance Asia/Pacific presents a set of key indicators of health status, the determinants of health, health care resources and utilisation, health care expenditure and financing and quality of care across 27 Asia-Pacific countries and territories. It also provides a series of dashboards to compare performance across countries, and a thematic analysis on health inequalities. Drawing on a wide range of data sources, it builds on the format used in previous editions of Health at a Glance, and gives readers a better understanding of the factors that affect the health of populations and the performance of health systems in these countries and territories. Each of the indicators is presented in a user-friendly format, consisting of charts illustrating variations across countries and over time, brief descriptive analyses highlighting the major findings conveyed by the data, and a methodological box on the definition of the indicator and any limitations in data comparability. An annex provides additional information on the demographic context in which health systems operate.
Also available in: Korean
Financing of health care from households' out-of-pocket payments, voluntary payment schemes and external resources
On average, the share of health spending paid out-of-pocket has fallen by around 2 percentage points to 21.4% and 25.6% in high- and upper-middle income Asia-Pacific countries since 2010, whereas it has increased from 47.1% to 48.2% in low and lower-middle income Asia-Pacific countries (). The trend is quite diverse across the countries and the territories in the study. However, more than two thirds of the Asia-Pacific countries and territories reported a decrease, including between 7 and 10 percentage points for Papua New Guinea, Singapore and Indonesia, while Mongolia and Lao PDR reported a growth of around 10 percentage points in the same period. For each dollar spent on health, more than 60 centimes were “out-of-pocket” in Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and Myanmar in 2015.