ArticleInternational journal of environmental research and public health2021
Informal Payments by Patients in Central and Eastern Europe during the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Institutional Perspective.
Article in International journal of environmental research and public health, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 19 citations in OpenAlex.
- Beyond the price tag: a scoping review of the determinants of informal payments in health systems and strategies for curbing them.BMC health services research · 2026Article
- Explaining informal patient payments through gaps in governance - a comparative assessment of health system governance in three European countries.BMC health services research · 2026Article
- Building health system resilience in Romania: a consensus on policy priorities.Journal of medicine and life · 2025Article
- The Impact of Moral Hazard on Healthcare Utilization in Public Hospitals from Romania: Evidence from Patient Behaviors and Insurance Systems.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Exploring the influencing factors of patients sending red packets and the necessity of doctor-patient red packet agreements.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
- The red packet phenomenon from the perspective of young Chinese doctors: a questionnaire study.BMC medical ethics · 2022Article
- Corruption and Population Health in the European Union Countries-An Institutionalist Perspective.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- Informal payments by patients, institutional trust and institutional asymmetry.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Confronted with a global pandemic, public healthcare systems are under pressure, making access to healthcare services difficult for patients. This provides fertile ground for using illegal practices such as informal payments to gain access. This paper aims to evaluate the use of informal payments by patients during the COVID-19 pandemic and the institutions that affect the prevalence of this practice. Various measurements of formal and informal institutions are here investigated, namely the acceptability of corruption, the level of trust, transparency, and performance of the healthcare system. To do so, a logistic regression of 10,859 interviews with patients conducted across 11 Central and Eastern Europe countries in October-December 2020 is employed. The finding is that there are large disparities between countries in the prevalence of informal payments, and that the practice is more likely to occur where there are poorer formal and informal institutions, namely higher acceptability of corruption, lower trust in authorities, lower perceived transparency in handling the COVID-19 pandemic, difficult access to, and poor quality of, healthcare services, and higher mortality rates due to the COVID-19 pandemic. These findings suggest that policy measures for tackling informal payments need to address the current state of the institutional environment.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.