Issues in the Costing of Public Sector Outputs: The Public Medical Services of Malaysia

摘要

The paper reports on one component of the research of RPO 296 (The Distributive Effects of Public Spending). The bulk of the paper estimates the unit costs of outputs of Malsysia's public medical care services. Chief among these are various kinds of clinic visits and hospital days. In the process the paper describes the accounting system of the Ministry of Health and its shortcomings in providing basic cost data. The paper also describes the methodology for estimating the various unit costs. The paper discusses in detail some of the conceptual issues in deriving the various costs; e.g., the treatment of cost not clearly allocable by specific outputs, and briefly compares Malaysian costs with those of Tunisia.