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The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors predicting which employees receive employer‐funded commercial pension insurance contributions in Shanghai's zhenbao (town insurance) program, introduced by the Shanghai Government in 2003.

A series of hypotheses are developed to examine whether employees with characteristics that make them more influential constituencies will be more likely to receive voluntary commercial pension insurance contributions. The hypotheses are tested through application of a ReLogit model to data on 103,095 employees enrolled in the town insurance scheme in one district as at the end of 2004.

The study finds that only a small proportion of individuals in the sample receive commercial pension insurance. The most important determinant of whether an employee received commercial pension insurance is his or her level of education.

The study provides support for the societal corporatist perspective that employers who place a premium on human capital and invest significant resources in the skills of their workers will favor social policies that target benefits to a selected group of workers to reward their performance and foster commitment. A limitation of the research is that it is based on data collected soon after the town insurance scheme was introduced. The low level of employee coverage may improve once employers become more familiar with the operation of the scheme.

Employers should consider social insurance as a labor market strategy to retain staff and enhance the human resource base of the firm.

Little attention has been given to the role of employer‐funded social insurance within the ambit of labor market strategies designed to enhance the human resource base of the organisation. This is the first study to use micro level data to examine the determinants of voluntary employer contributions to social insurance.

Public hospitals in China usually rely on revenues from medical services and medications to compensate for major costs given their nonprofit nature. The lack of government subsidies and unreasonable prices of medical services have led to high medical costs and unbalanced reimbursement system for public hospitals. There is a critical need of research on improvement of reimbursement system that will create positive effect on China’s health-care system. This paper aims to focus on four dimensions of stakeholders (government, patients, medical insurance agencies and social organization) and six major expenditures to explore reimbursement scheme for public hospitals in China with the purpose of relieving unbalanced income and expenditure of hospitals, avoiding medication markups and reducing medical expenses from patients.

In this paper, the authors study reimbursement scheme for public hospitals from the perspective of four dimensions of stakeholders and how stakeholders reimburse six major expenditures of hospitals. A total of 128 effective samples were collected from financial data of 32 public hospitals through 2009-2012. This paper analyzes the econometric models of the selected revenue and expenditure. This paper analyzes the econometric models of the selected revenue and expenditure using linear regression. The linear relationship between each cost and different types of incomes (i.e. reimbursements from government, patients, insurance agencies and social organization) is analyzed before and after cancelling the medication markups.

Results from empirical research verify that government reimbursement is insufficient, and using medication markups to compensate for medical service costs has become a serious problem for China’s public hospitals. To avoid the medication markups and improve the reimbursement scheme, government should reimburse labor cost, fixed assets cost and research cost; patients and medical insurance agencies should reimburse the costs of medical service, medication and administration/operations; and social organization should supplement the fixed assets cost.

In this study, the authors defined and classified stakeholders of reimbursement scheme for public hospitals in China, which help understand the roles and effects that different stakeholders can play in compensation. Along with the proposed reimbursement scheme framework, this study will help make effective implementation of new health-care reform program in China.

Exemption from hospital charges may appear as an essential policy in order to support the poor. Such policies can function for the fulfillment of governments’ social- and justice-based responsibilities in public hospitals. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the pattern of offering discounts to the poor and the effect of Iran’s recent Health Sector Evolution Plan on it.

The authors conducted analytical research longitudinally on the data related to cash discounts offered to the poor within a teaching hospital. Data were collected through the period of four months, September to December 2013, before the establishment of the Health Sector Evolution Plan, and in the similar months through 2014, after the establishment of the Health Sector Evolution Plan, in order to compare the amount of cash discounts. The type of insurance, length of stay, amount of discounts offered to patients, and total costs of hospital charges were studied and compared by referring to the social working department. Data were analyzed using the χ²-test, Mann-Whitney U test, ANOVA, and regression analysis aided by SPSS 20.

The number of patients offered discounts or exempted from payment in 2014 reduced compared to the number in 2013. The highest rate of demand for discounts was related to patients covered by Emdad Committee followed by those who had no insurance. The ratio of discount to cost in the oncology ward was higher than other groups.

The results of the present study can contribute to the plans of health system policy makers in organizing measures for supporting poor patients toward accessing healthcare services.

This paper examines some of the key features of social health insurance systems by drawing on experiences in Germany, Switzerland, France and The Netherlands. These countries have all implemented a variety of reforms, including some competition between health insurers in order to meet some of their health care objectives. The paper highlights some of the strengths and weaknesses inherent in these systems and how they perform on a number of criteria and suggests a number of trade‐offs which policymakers will have to grapple with to attain some of their (often competing) health system goals of efficiency, choice, solidarity and equity. This paper should provide useful information for countries with health care systems in transition or those considering adopting aspects of social health insurance systems.

This article analyzes the impact of social insurance on firm performance by obtaining evidence from Vietnamese small- and medium-sized enterprises.

The method employed in the research is the generalized method of moments for testing hypotheses of data collected from the General Statistics Office of Vietnam.

The results show that social insurance contributions can enhance firm performance in three dimensions: return on equity (ROE), labor productivity and total factor productivity (TFP). In addition, financial leverage, firm size, the average wage of workers and fixed assets have an impact on the social insurance costs of these companies.

This article provides a novel explanation of the contribution of social insurance to firm performance. In particular, social insurance contribution not only increases labor productivity but also boosts the growth of the TFP of companies. In addition, the article points out that taking care of the benefits of employees is a valuable investment of companies. These are the unique contributions of the paper to the literature on the economic impact of social insurance.

Social health insurance framework of any country is the national identifier of the country’s policy for taking care of its population which cannot access or afford quality healthcare. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the strategic imperatives of digital technology for the inclusive social health models for the BoP customers.

A qualitative exploratory study using in-depth personal interviews with 53 Indian health insurance CXOs was conducted with a semi-structured questionnaire. Using MaxQDA software, the interview transcripts were analyzed by means of thematic content analysis technique and patterns identified based on the expert opinions.

A framework for the strategic imperatives of digital technology in social health insurance emerged from the study highlighting three key themes for technology implementation in the social health insurance sector – analytics for risk management, cost optimization for operations and enhancement of customer experience. The study results provide key insights about how insurers can enhance the coverage of BoP population by leveraging technology.

The framework would help health insurers and policymakers to select strategic choices related to technology that would enable creation of inclusive health insurance models for BoP customers.

The absence of specific studies highlighting the strategic digital imperatives in social health insurance creates a unique value proposition for this framework which can help health insurers in developing a convergence in their risk management and customer delight objectives and assist the government in the formulation of a sustainable social health insurance framework.

Reveals that public sector organizations across the globe have been subject to cuts in government spending, allied to demands for enhanced efficiency and effectiveness. Consequently many have embarked on radical programmes of change which may adversely affect the psychological wellbeing of employees. Examines linkages between organizational change and the psychological wellbeing of employees within the Swedish social insurance organization “Försäkringskassan”. Gives results which show that the process of organization change is stressful; issues associated with the process of change were linked to employee anxiety and symptoms of being “worn out”. As the pressures facing public sector organizations everywhere bear a high degree of similarity, suggests that management take cognizance of these findings. Argues that when making decisions regarding the planning and implementation of organizational change, the stress factor must receive a prominent place on the change management agenda.

The purpose of this study is to explore and prioritize the factors that determine the social insurance contribution of unorganized workers.

A two-stage procedure was adopted to recognize and prioritize factors influencing the social insurance participation of unorganized workers: first, crucial factors influencing unorganized workers’ contribution towards social insurance were identified by employing exploratory factor analysis, and in the second phase, the fuzzy analytical hierarchal process was applied to rank the specified criteria and then sub-criteria by assigning weights.

Four broad factors were identified, namely, economic, political, operational and socio-psychological, that significantly influence unorganized workers’ contribution towards social insurance. Later findings revealed that the prime influencer of unorganized workers’ contribution is employment contracts followed by average earnings, delivery of quality services, eligibility and accessibility.

The research findings are feasible as the basic propositions are based on real-world scenario. The identification and ranking of factors have the potential to be used as a checklist for policymakers when designing pension and social insurance for unorganized workers. If it is not possible to consider all, the criteria and sub-criteria assigned upper rank can be given priority to extend pension coverage for a large group of working poor.

The key factors driving social insurance contributions have been highlighted by studying the stakeholders’ perceptions at a micro level. By comprehending the challenges, there is a possibility of covering a large section of the working poor into social insurance coverage.

This paper is believed to be one of its kinds to acknowledge a combination of factors that determine the contribution of unorganized workers to social insurance. This study is an empirical investigation to prioritize the essential drivers of social insurance participation by low-income cohorts in the context of emerging countries. The present approach of employing fuzzy logic has also very limited use in social insurance literature yet.

According to the importance of strategic purchasing as an effective tool for resource allocation and service procurement, this study examines national laws, regulations and other related documents related to the strategic purchasing of health services related to the advanced medical equipment in Iran.

It was a national qualitative document analysis conducted in 2019 applying content analysis approach. The four-step Scott method was used to include the documents in terms of authenticity, credibility, representation and meaningfulness. After retrieving the related documents, they were coded with the implicit and explicit approach. MAXQDA₁₀ was used for content analysis.

The findings show that according to the framework of effective factors on the strategic purchasing of health services, seven main factors are determined as the main essential factors in purchasing advanced medical equipment. These factors consist of health care providers, health service buyers, purchaser and service provider contracts, payment mechanisms, organization and management evaluation of health technology including expensive medical equipment and technology-related.

The study had some limitations as follows: the proposed method should be tested and its feasibility has to be investigated through appropriate tools for Iranian insurance companies and those with the similar settings.

The results of this study can shed more light for policy makers affiliated in Ministry of Health as the main service provider, Ministry of Welfare and the insurance agencies as the main purchasers of health services on paying attention to these seven main themes extracted from the upstream documents and laws and regulations of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The strategic purchasing of expensive high technology-based medical equipment is a necessity for Iranian public health insurance organizations that is emphasized in national documents in the way of implementing this necessity.

This study examines all the laws and regulations and all related documents in the strategic purchasing of health services related to advanced medical equipment, giving an analysis of the most important challenges and requirements of implementing strategic purchasing in the health services provision sector with expensive medical equipment.

The aim of this study is to debunk the relationship between user participation practices and the development and success of information systems/information technology implementations. While most studies practically rely on how many participation activities are performed, the process through which users engage in user participation is not specified.

A mixed method approach was applied to study the research questions. A number of relationships were tested by survey data collected among 143 end-users and 49 interviews of employees of a large Dutch social insurance organization that implemented a new and integrative business process management (BPM) system.

The results show that specification of the participation context is of key importance for understanding the success of BPM implementation. Quantitative and qualitative analyses show that rich participation activities hold a stronger positive relationship with the BPM system development and implementation success than other participatory activities that only assist development or implementation. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the updated theory of user participation by Markus and Mao can be turned into a useful instrument for measuring the different aspects of participation.

Most studies on user participation “only” measure how many participation activities were performed, and not how or why they were performed. Furthermore, the combination of qualitative and quantitative data and instruments resulted in a greater understanding of how exactly user participation was brought into practice and how the consequences of this practice were interrelated.