Recognizing the importance of health in the process of economic and social development and for improving the quality of life of the citizens, the Government of India launched the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM). Under the decentralization scheme of NRHM, the district was supposed to be the hub around which all health and family welfare services were to be planned and managed. Therefore, it is important to understand the performance of each district with respect to the implementation of NRHM. Moreover, one of the objectives of NRHM is to reduce infant mortality and to increase access to immunization and nutrition programmes. Given the wide scope of the Mission and multiplicity of activities, it is important to carry out its appraisal with an objective of evaluating the performance of districts in terms of their immunization coverage among rural population. Hence, this study aims at understanding the efficiency of health system in Kerala by evaluating the performance of each district in Kerala.
AdayL.A.BegleyC.E.LairsonD.R.SlaterC.H. (1998). Evaluating the healthcare system: Effectiveness, efficiency, and equity (2nd ed.). Chicago: Health Administration Press.
2.
BankerR.D.CharnesA.CooperW.W. (1984). Some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis. Management Science, 30(9), 1078–1092.
3.
BankerR.DConradR.F.StraussR.P. (1986). A Comparative Application of Data Envelopment Analysis and Translog Methods: An Illustrative Study of Hospital Production. Management Science, 32(1), 30–44.
4.
BiornE.HagenT.P.IversenT.MagnussenJ. (2002). The effect of activity-based financing on hospital efficiency. A panel data analysis of DEA efficiency scores 1992–2000. Health Care Management Science, 6(4), 271–283.
5.
Census. (2011). Primary Census Abstract-Data Highlights- Kerala series 33. India: Ministry of Home affairs, Government of India.
6.
CharnesA.CooperW.W.LewinA.Y.SeifordL.M. (1994). Data envelopment analysis: Theory, methodology and application. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
7.
CharnesA.CooperW.W.RhodesE. (1978). Measuring the efficiency of decision making units. European Journal of Operational Research, 2(6), 419–444.
8.
CooperM.J.JacksonW.E.PattersonG.A. (2003). Evidence of predictability in the cross-section of bank stock returns. Journal of Banking and Finance, 27(5), 817–850.
9.
DebreuG. (1951). The coefficient of resource utilization. Econometrica, 19(3), 273–292.
10.
FarrellM.J. (1957). The measurement of productive efûciency. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (General), 120(3), 253–290.
11.
FerrierG.D.ValdmanisV. (1996). Rural hospital performance and its correlates. The Journal of Productivity Analysis, 7(1), 63–80.
12.
GolanyB.ThoreS. (1997). The economic and social performance of nations: efficiency and returns to scale. Socio-Economic Plannning Sciences, 31(3), 191–204.
13.
GrosskopfS. (1986). The role of the reference technology in measuring productive efficiency. Economic Journal, 96(382), 499–513.
14.
GrosskopfS.ValdmanisV. (1987). Evaluating hospital performance: a non-parametric approach. Journal of Health Economics, 6(2), 89–107.
15.
HollingsworthB.ParkinD. (1995). The efficiency of Scottish acute hospitals—An application of data envelopment analysis. IMA Journal of Mathematics Applied in Medicine and Biology, 1(3–4), 161–173.
16.
KathuriaV.SankarD. (2005). Inter-state disparities in health outcomes in rural India: An analysis using a stochastic production frontier approach. Development Policy Review, 23(2), 145–163.
17.
KoopmansT.C. (1951). An analysis of production as an efficient combination of activities. In KoopmansT.C. (Ed.), Activity analysis of production and allocation, proceeding of a conference (pp. 33–97). London: John Wiley and Sons Inc.
18.
MagnussenJ. (1996). Efficiency measurement and the operationalization of hospital production. Health Services Research, 31(1), 21–37.
19.
McKillopD.G.KerrC.A.GlassJ.C.McCallionG.M. (1999). Best-practice measures of resource utilization for hospitals: a useful complement in performance assessment. Public Administration, 77(3), 639–650.
20.
National Rural Health Mission (NRHM). (2005). Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) Guidelines. India: Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.
21.
PrachithaJ.ShanmugamK.R. (2012). Efficiency of raising health outcomes in the Indian states. Working paper. Chennai, India: Madras School of Economics.
22.
ParkinD.HollingsworthB. (1997). Measuring production efficiency of acute hospitals in Scotland, 1991–94: Validity issues in data envelopment analysis. Applied Economics, 29(11), 1425–1433.
23.
RosenmanR.SiddharthanK.AhernM. (1997). Output efficiency of health maintenance organizations in Florida. Health Economics, 6(3), 295–302.
24.
SatyanarayanaG.M.JayadevaC.T.RamakrishnaH.V. (2012). Evaluation of Indian rural health care center programs: By the application of data envelopment analysis technique. Bonfring International Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management Science, 2(1), 10–13.
25.
ShoneR. (1981). Applications in Intermediate Microeconomics. Oxford: Martin Robertson.
26.
WHO & UNICEF (2010). Progress on Sanitation and Drinking water: Joint Monitoring Programme 2010 update. ISBN: 978 92 4 156395 6
