Dealing with Health and Health Care System Challenges in China: assessing health determinants and health care reforms

This dissertation investigates the challenges faced by China around 2010 in two domains – population health and the health care system.
Specifically, chapters 2 and 3 are devoted to health challenges, explaining the female health disadvantage in later life and assessing the effect of only children on their elderly parents’ mental wellbeing.
Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to health care system challenges, assessing in rural China if bottom-up results-based reforms could improve the health system performance under limited funding and if a simplified diagnosis-related group (DRG)-based hospital payment system could contain the fast-growing health expenditure.