Assessing the impact of national antibiotic campaigns in Europe

Massimo Filippini, L. Ortiz and Giuliano Masiero

The European Journal of Health Economics, 2013, vol. 14, issue 4, 587-599

Abstract: Because of evidence of causal association between antibiotic use and bacterial resistance, the implementation of national policies has emerged as a interesting tool for controlling and reversing bacterial resistance. The aim of this study was to assess the impact of public policies on antibiotic use in Europe using a differences-in-differences approach. Comparable data on systemic antibiotics administered in 21 European countries are available for a 11-year period between 1997 and 2007. Data on national campaigns are drawn from the public health literature. We estimate an econometric model of antibiotic consumption with country fixed effects and control for the main socioeconomic and epidemiological factors. Lagged values and the instrumental variables approach are applied to address endogeneity aspects of the prevalence of infections and the adoption of national campaigns. We find evidence that public campaigns significantly reduce the use of antimicrobials in the community by 1.3–5.6 defined daily doses per 1,000 inhabitants yearly. This represents an impact of roughly 6.5–28.3 % on the mean level of antibiotic use in Europe between 1997 and 2007. The effect is robust across different measurement methods. Further research is needed to investigate the effectiveness of policy interventions targeting different social groups such as general practitioners or patients. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2013

Keywords: Antibiotic use; Public policies; National campaigns; Difference-in-difference; I18; C21; C54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10198-012-0404-9 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Assessing the impact of national antibiotic campaigns in Europe (2012)
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:14:y:2013:i:4:p:587-599

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

DOI: 10.1007/s10198-012-0404-9

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 ().