An important part of Norwegian welfare policy is provision of free dental care for children up to the age of 18. After that age some counties have introduced a public subsidy scheme for young people aged 19-20 years, where 75% of their dental care expenses are covered. After the age of 21, all patients have to pay the costs for dental care themselves. The focus of the present work was to examine the effect that the public subsidy scheme for young adults had on demand for dental care, and its effect on dental health. The analyses were performed on 2 extensive sets of survey data. The major finding was that the public subsidy scheme had no effect on demand for dental care. In addition, there was no relationship between whether these young adults were covered by the subsidy scheme and dental health.

The paper examines productivity in the provision of public dental services in Norway. The main responsibility of the public dental services is to provide care for all children up to 18 years of age. Most dental care is provided by public dental officers. Productivity was measured by estimating a stochastic production frontier from input and output data from the public dental service in Norway. The results indicate that there are increasing returns to scale. Our measure of technical efficiency showed that the level of inefficiency is fairly small. However, the inefficiency is greater when estimated from a deterministic production frontier rather than from a stochastic frontier. One limitation of the present methodology is that it does not say anything about the level of efficiency in the Norwegian public dental service in absolute terms. A greater level of inefficiency would have been identified if a few counties had performed clearly better than the rest.

The aim of this study was to identify possible factors associated with the marked geographical variation in supply of public dental services in Norway. We identified three sources for this uneven distribution: differences in dental care needs, differences in revenue levels between counties, and differences in the party composition of the county councils. Analyses were undertaken to ascertain whether these factors were related to the variation in the number of man-labor years of public dental officers. The analyses were performed on a set of data from Norwegian counties for the period 1985-92. There was an association between the number of man-labor years of public dental officers and our indicators of dental care needs, county revenue, and party composition of the county councils. Our findings are encouraging, as they indicate that the county councils seemed to respond to the dental care needs of the local population. On the other hand, there were inequalities in supply of public dental services that were due to differences in revenue between counties. From an equity point of view, this inequality is undesirable. The inequality could most likely be reduced by decreasing the variation in revenue between counties. Differences in party composition of the county councils had only a small effect on the geographical variation in the number of man-labor years of public dental officers.

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