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Health economics in its widest sense deals with several different broad areas of resource allocation: -the best way to finance health care systems (e.g.. public or private finance); -the study of supply and demand for health care (the study of health care markets); - valuing health and assessing the relationship between health and its social and economic determinants (analysis of the relationship between health status and income); - as an aid to management of health services (needs assessment); - microeconomic evaluation (concerned with comparing the resource implications of alternative ways to deliver health care e.g. an assessment of the efficiency of new health technologies such as MRI scans). The basis and techniques of microeconomic evaluation form the core of the book Elementary Economic Evaluation in Health Care by Tom Jefferson, Vittorio Demicheli and Miranda Mugford, published in 1996 by the BMJ Publishing Group. Readers should refer to this book for a more detailed description of the techniques and worked examples.