Edinburgh Napier University

  This thesis analyses whether the movement towards privatisation (through various phases of corporatisation, changes in management and operation) has been associated with an improvement in the performance (efficiency, effectiveness, and quality) of the Ministry of Health (MoH) public hospitals in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), 1979 to 2014. The study argues that changes in management and operational framework, in different corporatisation phases, would be associated with the performance of hospitals. Accordingly, the study tests whether the alleged theoretical benefits of corporatisation identified in the literature were reflected in the data gathered. Research questions are addressed by developing deductively and testing hypotheses via econometric models. The data identifies which KSA hospital management/corporatisation phase is generally more efficient, and which provides the best overall performance indicators across the study period. The econometric methods employed are Data Envelope Analysis, Stochastic Frontier Analysis, Panel Data analysis, and Least Squares Regression Analysis. The findings suggest that, taking into account the efficiency, effectiveness, and quality aspects of hospital performance, fully corporatised hospitals (on average) achieve relatively better overall performance. However large hospital efficiencies may be inapplicable to small rural hospitals and each hospital should be considered on a case-by-case basis in additional to being part of an overall programme at the national level. Despite this caveat, broad recommendations are proposed which may help to increase the performance of hospitals in the KSA.