| Sumario: | The current paper reports the first step towards the development of a systematic approach to health sector planning capable of integration into a more general programme of economic development. The aim of the present research has been to devise a potentially operational method for allocating the scarce health sector funds, manpower and facilities among different disease control programmes and individual activities in the way which yields the optimum feasible reduction of mortality, morbidity and economic losses. At the core of this method is a linear 1 These aspects of improved health are discussed more fully in Feldstein [14]. 2 There are, of course, exceptions: see [2], [6], [9], [24] and [29] in the References listed on pp. 162-3. activity analysis description of the health care sector: a vector of inputs and a vector of outputs is associated with each health activity. This leads to an optimization procedure using a linear programming algorithm.[1] <BR> A significant feature of the approach is that the required informational inputs can be decomposed in such a way that they can be provided by medical and epidemiological experts. As a result, the calculation can be improved continually as experts criticize specific coefficients and provide better data. A second important virtue of this approach is that the separate roles of value judgments and technical information are clearly distinguished. Because almost all of the data and calculations are of a technical nature, the technical staff of the health care planning agency can elaborate and improve the analysis without having to introduce their own value judgments into the planning process.
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