Disease Complementarities and the Evaluation of Public Health Interventions

William Dow, Jessica Holmes, Tomas Philipson and Xavier Sala-i-Martin

No 5216, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper provides a theoretical and empirical investigation of the positive complementarities between disease-specific policies introduced by competing risks of mortality. The incentive to invest in prevention against one cause of death depends positively on the level of survival from other causes. This means that a specific public health intervention has benefits other than the direct medical reduction in mortality: it affects the incentives to fight other diseases so the overall reduction in mortality will, in general, be larger than that predicted by the direct medical effects. We discuss evidence of these cross-disease effects by using data on neo-natal tetanus vaccination through the Expanded Programme on Immunization of the World Health Organization.

JEL-codes: I0 I1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1995-08
Note: EFG EH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published as American Economic Review, Vol. 89, no. 5 (December 1999): 1357-1372.

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