Economics

University of Calcutta (informally known as Calcutta University or CU) is a collegiate public state university located in Kolkata, West Bengal, India.&nbsp;Within India it is recognized as a &quot;Five-Star University&quot; and accredited &quot;A&quot; Grade by National Assessment and Accreditation Council.

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The University of Calcutta has secured the Fifth position among the Universities of India in the prestigious &quot;Indian University Ranking 2019&quot; list, released by the NIRF of the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India.

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It was established on 24 January 1857, and was one of the first institutions in Asia to be established as a multidisciplinary and Western-style university. Its alumni and faculty include several heads of state, heads of government, social reformers, prominent artists, only academy award winner and Dirac medal winner in India, many Fellows of the Royal Society and five Nobel laureates as of 2019 which is highest in South Asia.

University Of Calcutta

Many federal states in India have recently taken steps to improve distribution and affordability of medicines across public hospitals for reducing high out-of-pocket (OOP) expenditure. West Bengal has introduced a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) scheme, Fair Price Medicine Shops (FPMS) within government hospitals in 2012, which offers high discounts on maximum retail price of the drugs. This model introduces the state as a facilitator, rather than provider or financer, of health care. This paper attempts to measure its impact on OOP expenditure (OOPE) of patients using propensity-score-matching technique on the data collected from primary survey among patients. The study finds that although for non-poor patients, the average OOPE has reduced significantly, the impact has been counter-productive for the poor patients, hinting that PPP intervention seems to work only for relatively better-off people, as the best alternative for the poorest remains to be free provision of drugs from the government. The difference in outcome lay in the fact that the nature of control groups differed between poor and non-poor patients. Those poor patients who did not visit FPMS received most of the medicines free (hence OOPE nearly zero), while for the non-poor patients not visiting FPMS bought the drugs from outside retail shops. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

GENERAL

International Journal of Health Planning and Management

Policy intervention for access to medicine: Does it work similarly for poor and non-poor?

This paper attempts to address the effects of different types of loan contract on a borrower's incentive for investment in information.We model the trade-off that a borrower faces when she collects information about the potential of her intended projects both under individual and joint liability loan contracts. Even under limited liability, the borrower faces a trade-off at information collection stage between the cost of signal collection and the cost of her time and effort for project execution in case the project fails.We show that joint liability contract induces borrowers to invest more in information than individual liability for low rates of interest. However, for some high rates of interest, borrowers invest positive amount in information collection under individual liability, but do not take up the project under joint liability.