Did the COVID-19 pandemic change the willingness to pay for an early warning system for infectious diseases in Europe?

Sebastian Himmler (), Job Exel and Werner Brouwer
Additional contact information
Sebastian Himmler: Erasmus University Rotterdam
Job Exel: Erasmus University Rotterdam

The European Journal of Health Economics, 2022, vol. 23, issue 1, No 8, 94 pages

Abstract: Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the need for effective infectious disease outbreak prevention. This could entail installing an integrated, international early warning system, aiming to contain and mitigate infectious diseases outbreaks. The amount of resources governments should spend on such preventive measures can be informed by the value citizens attach to such a system. This was already recognized in 2018, when a contingent valuation willingness to pay (WTP) experiment was fielded, eliciting the WTP for such a system in six European countries. We replicated that experiment in the spring of 2020 to test whether and how WTP had changed during an actual pandemic (COVID-19), taking into account differences in infection rates and stringency of measures by government between countries. Overall, we found significant increases in WTP between the two time points, with mean WTP for an early warning system increasing by about 50% (median 30%), from around €20 to €30 per month. However, there were marked differences between countries and subpopulations, and changes were only partially explained by COVID-19 burden. We discuss possible explanations for and implication of our findings.

Keywords: Infectious disease outbreaks; COVID-19; Early warning system; Willingness to pay; Multi-country study (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H41 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10198-021-01353-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:eujhec:v:23:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1007_s10198-021-01353-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10198/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10198-021-01353-6

Access Statistics for this article

The European Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J.-M.G.v.d. Schulenburg

More articles in The European Journal of Health Economics from Springer, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().