Addressing antibiotic abuse in China: An experimental audit study

Janet Currie, Wanchuan Lin and Juanjuan Meng ()

Journal of Development Economics, 2014, vol. 110, issue C, 39-51

Abstract: China has high rates of antibiotic abuse and antibiotic resistance but the causes are still a matter for debate. Strong physician financial incentives to prescribe are likely to be an important cause. However, patient demand (or physician beliefs about patient demand) is often cited and may also play a role. We use an audit study to examine the effect of removing financial incentives, and to try to separate out the effects of patient demand. We implement a number of different experimental treatments designed to try to rule out other possible explanations for our findings. Together, our results suggest that financial incentives are the main driver of antibiotic abuse in China, at least in the young and healthy population we draw on in our study.

Keywords: Antibiotic abuse; Audit study; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (63)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387814000704
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:deveco:v:110:y:2014:i:c:p:39-51

DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2014.05.006

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig

More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().