Economic Interpretation of Human Behaviour in Terms of Health Promotion

Zdeněk Chytil, Arnošt Klesla and Tomáš Kosička

Prague Economic Papers, 2015, vol. 2015, issue 4, 371-385

Abstract: The economic approach to health promotion describes human behaviour towards preservation of individual health by methods of the economic analysis. We have developed mathematical model based on the Grossman's theory of Demand for Health (1972) showing two basic approaches. The investors prevent diseases by adopting healthy lifestyle and therefore minimize costs of healthcare. The consumers, however, depend on the healthcare system and cause further increase of its expenditures. It is also demonstrated that the latter approach leads to the increase of expenditures on maintaining the level of public health. Also the strong incidence of chronic and almost incurable non-communicable diseases excludes passive consumerism care for their own health from the rational choice. These effects vary in developing and developed countries and further burden healthcare systems for instance in the new EU Member States.

Keywords: rationality; health promotion behaviour; demand for health; healthy life style; health illusion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I15 I18 I19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://pep.vse.cz/doi/10.18267/j.pep.542.html (text/html)
http://pep.vse.cz/doi/10.18267/j.pep.542.pdf (application/pdf)
free of charge

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:prg:jnlpep:v:2015:y:2015:i:4:id:542:p:371-385

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
Editorial office Prague Economic Papers, University of Economics, nám. W. Churchilla 4, 130 67 Praha 3, Czech Republic
http://pep.vse.cz

DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.542

Access Statistics for this article

Prague Economic Papers is currently edited by Klára Pavlová

More articles in Prague Economic Papers from Prague University of Economics and Business Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Stanislav Vojir ().