The soft budget constraint syndrome in the hospital sector

• Authors: Kornai Janos
• Languages of publication: HU

Abstracts

EN

Researches so far have examined mainly how the soft budget constraint syndrome appears in the corporate sphere and the credit system. This article concentrates on the hospital sector. It describes the motivations and the contradictory behaviour of the five main types of participant in the events: patients, doctors, hospital managers, politicians, and hospital owners. The motivations explain why the propensity to overspend and the tendency to soften the budget constraint are so strong. The burdens of overspending and indebtedness are pushed upwards at every level of the decision-making and funding processes. The article considers the connection between the soft budget constraint syndrome and the various forms of ownership (state ownership and the non-profit and for-profit forms of non-state ownership). Finally, the phenomenon is examined from the normative point of view: what are the favourable and unfavourable consequences of hardening the budget constraint and how these are reflected in the consciousness of the participants in the normative dilemmas and events.

Keywords

EN

CAPITAL AND OWNERSHIP STRUCTURE; HOSPITAL SECTOR; SOFT BUDGET CONSTRAINT SYNDROME

Discipline

• ECONOMICS: ECONOMICS

• Publisher: Committee for Economic Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Kozgazdasagi Szemle (Economic Review)
• Year: 2008
• Volume: 55
• Issue: 12
• Pages: 1037-1056
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Kornai Janos

• Janos Kornai, no address given, contact the journal editor

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

10HUAAAA078713