The elasticity of demand for health care in Burkina Faso: differences across age and income groups.

Like many other developing countries, Burkina Faso has been exploring how community resources can be tapped to co-finance health services. Although revenue generation is important for the viability of health services, effects on utilization and on equity of access to health care must also be considered. The authors present a logistic regression model to derive price elasticities of demand for health care based on cross-sectional survey data. While demand for health care appears inelastic overall (-0.79), subgroup analysis reveals differences in elasticity across age and income groups. Elasticities of demand for infants and children (-3.6 and -1.7) and for the lowest income quartile (-1.4) are substantially greater than overall elasticity. The method used is unusual in that it allows estimation of elasticities before the introduction of user fees. This increases the value of the information to policy makers.