Table 1.

Overview of methodological approaches

	England [1]	Spain [4]	Australia [5]	The Netherlands (Stadhouders et al. [7])	The Netherlands (van Baal et al. [6])	Sweden [8]	South Africa [9]	China [10]
Part 1
Dependent variable	Mortality-based disease-specific aggregated to all-cause YLL	All-cause QALE	Mortality-related all-cause QALYs	Mortality- and morbidity-related disease-specific QALYs	Disease-specific mortality	All-cause mortality	All-cause mortality (crude mortality rate)	All-cause mortality rate and DALYs
Source of variation	Areas	Areas over time	Areas	Age/sex/disease patient groups over time	Age/sex patient groups over time	Areas over time	Areas over time	Areas
Econometric approach	IV	Panel fixed effects	IV	Panel fixed effects	First differences	Pooled IV	Panel fixed effects	OLS
Control variables	Need for healthcare and SES, demographics	SES, health-related and time fixed effects	Need for healthcare, geography and demographics	Number of patients and time trend	Time fixed effects and patient group time trends	SES, demographics, health not amenable to healthcare, time fixed effects	SES, need for healthcare, region and time fixed effects	SES, demographics and region fixed effects
Part 2
Measure of morbidity used	EQ-5D	EQ-5D	SF-6D	EQ-5D	SF-6D	EQ-5D	YLD	YLD

DALYs disability-adjusted life years, EQ-5D EuroQoL-5D, IV instrumental variable, OLS ordinary least squares, QALE quality-adjusted life expectancy, QALY quality-adjusted life-year, SES socioeconomic status, SF-6D Short-Form six-dimension health state, YLD years lived with disability, YLL years of life lost