Assessing health system performance: A model-based approach

It is difficult to assess countries' relative success in addressing issues of public health because countries are subject to very different background conditions. To address this problem we offer a model-based approach for assessing health system performance. Specifically, an index of public health is regressed against a vector of variables intended to capture economic, educational, cultural, geographic, and epidemiological endowments. The residual from this model is regarded as a plausible measure of public health performance at the national level. We argue that a model-based approach to performance is informative for policymakers and academics as it focuses attention on those aspects of a country's health profile that are not constrained by structural factors. This sharpens comparisons across countries and through time, and also allows one to evaluate the degree to which health systems have lived up to their potential. •Offers assessment of country-level public health performance given background endowments.•Based on index of public health comprised of life expectancy and infant mortality.•Identifies over- and under-performers across the 1960–2010 period.•Numerous robustness tests confirm the viability of this novel approach to health performance.