Awareness and AIDS: A Political Economy Model

Gani Aldashev and Jean-Marie Baland

No 92, Carlo Alberto Notebooks from Collegio Carlo Alberto

Abstract: We present a simple political economy model that explains two major puzzles of government policies to combat HIV/AIDS epidemic: the lack of policy response in many countries where the epidemic is massive and the reversal of the downward trend in HIV prevalence in the countries that have adopted early agressive prevention campaigns. The model builds on the assumption that the unaware citizens impose a negative externality on the aware by increasing the risk of contagion. Prevention campaigns raise awareness of the current generation, which then partially transmit this awareness to the next generation, thus creating political support for the next-period awareness campaigns. The economy has two steady-state equilibria: the "good" one (with high awareness and low prevalence) and the "bad" one (low awareness, high prevalence). The "good" equilibrium is fragile, i.e. a sufficiently large exogenous drop in HIV prevalence undermines the next-generation political support for campaigns and makes the economy drift away towards the "bad" equilibrium.

Keywords: HIV/AIDS; voting; overlapping generations; awareness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H51 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2008
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-dge, nep-hea and nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.carloalberto.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/no.92.pdf (application/pdf)

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:cca:wpaper:92

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Carlo Alberto Notebooks from Collegio Carlo Alberto Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Giovanni Bert ().