Featuring
Osea Giuntella
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford
Host
Lee Crawfurd
Research Associate, CGD Europe
In this CGD Europe Sandwich Seminar, Osea Giuntella presents results from a paper with Catia Nicodemo and Carlos Vargas Silva on the effects of immigration on waiting times in the National Health Service (NHS) in England. Linking administrative records from the Hospital Episode Statistics (2003-2012) with immigration data drawn from the UK Labour Force Survey, they find that immigration reduced waiting times for outpatient referrals and did not have significant effects on waiting times in Accident and Emergency (A&E) and elective care.
These results are explained by the fact that immigration increases the chance that natives moved elsewhere and that immigrants tend to be healthier than the natives moving to different areas. On the contrary, they show that outpatient waiting times tend to increase in areas where native internal migrants moved into. Finally, they find evidence that immigration increased waiting times for outpatient referrals in more deprived areas outside London. The increase in average waiting times in more deprived areas is concentrated in the years immediately following the 2004 EU enlargement and vanished three to 4 years later.
The CGD Europe Sandwich Seminars bring some of the world's leading development scholars to discuss their new research and ideas. The presentations aim to meet an academic standard of quality, are at times technical, and retain a focus on a mixed audience of researchers and policy-makers.
