The Economic Control of Infectious Diseases
Despite interesting work on infectious diseases by such economists as Peter Francis, Michael Kremer, and Tomas Philipson, the literature does not set out the general structure of externalities involved in the prevention, and care of such diseases....
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2014
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2001/05/1346390/economic-control-infectious-diseases http://hdl.handle.net/10986/19657 |
| Summary: | Despite interesting work on infectious
diseases by such economists as Peter Francis, Michael
Kremer, and Tomas Philipson, the literature does not set out
the general structure of externalities involved in the
prevention, and care of such diseases. The authors identify
two kinds of externality. First, infectious people can
infect other people, who in turn can infect others, and so
on, in what the authors call the pure infection externality.
In controlling their own infection, people do not take into
account the social consequence of their infection. Second,
in the pure prevention externality, one individual's
preventive actions (such as killing mosquitoes) may directly
affect the probability of others becoming infected, whether
or not the preventive action succeeds for the individual
undertaking it. The authors provide a general framework for
discussing these externalities, and the role of government
interventions to offset them. They move the discussion away
from its focus on HIV (a fatal infection for which there are
few interventions), and on vaccinations (which involve
plausibly discrete decisions), to more general ideas of
prevention, and cure applicable to many diseases for which
interventions exhibit a continuum of intensities, subject to
diminishing marginal returns. Infections, and actions to
prevent, or cure them entail costs. Individuals balance
those parts of different costs that they can actually
control. In balancing costs to society, government policy
should take individual behavior into account. Doing so
requires a strategy combining preventive, and curative
interventions, to offset both the pure infection
externality, and the pure prevention externality. The
relative importance of the strategy's components
depends on: 1) The biology of the disease - including
whether an infection is transmitted from person to person,
or by vectors. 2) The possible outcomes of infection: death,
recovery with susceptibility, or recovery with immunity. 3)
The relative costs of the interventions. 4) Whether
interventions are targeted at the population as a whole, the
uninfected, the infected, or contacts between the
uninfected, and the infected. 5) The behavior of individuals
that leads to the two types of externalities. |
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