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Health Investment (health + investment)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting75%

Selected Abstracts

HEALTH, EDUCATION, AND LIFE CYCLE SAVINGS IN THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

ECONOMIC INQUIRY, Issue 3 2007
KAM KI TANG
This paper studies investment in health and human capital in a life cycle model. Health investment enhances survival to old age by improving health from its endowed level. The model predicts two distinctive phases of development. When income is low enough, the economy has no health investment and little savings, leading to slow growth. When income grows, health investment will become positive and the saving rate will rise, leading to higher life expectancy and faster growth. A health subsidy can move the economy from the first phase to the next. Subsidies on health and human capital investments can improve welfare. (JEL I00, J10, H50, O10) [source]

Improved infection control in the prevention of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in Australia: costs and benefits

AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF PUBLIC HEALTH, Issue 6 2004
Trang Vu
Objective: To evaluate the costs and benefits of infection control strategies to prevent the transmission of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in ophthalmic surgery in Australia. Methods: The reduction in the risk of iatrogenic transmission of vCJD from feasible infection control strategies was calculated using decision analytic models. A static model calculated the direct secondary transmission for surgical eye procedures, and a simple dynamic model estimated the change in the risk of a subsequent sustained epidemic over the longer term. The expected number of vCJD infections, their cost of care and years of life lost and the estimated cost of strategies included the direct costs of infection control measures were calculated taking a health system perspective. Results: The dynamic model (Markov process) predicted that from a hypothetical pool of as many as 100 primary vCJD cases there would be less than five iatrogenic infections in the next 30 years. If there are fewer than five primary cases the model predicted no secondary cases of vCJD. The costs of providing care for a vCJD case is estimated to be about 50,000, subject to considerable uncertainty. The minimum cost for using a partial infection control strategy to prevent an iatrogenic infection is likely to be in the order of several millions of dollars. Conclusions: Substantial public health investment would need to be made in order to reduce a low risk of iatrogenic transmission of vCJD. Given the likely number of cases of iatrogenic infection, and the order of magnitude of the costs of caring for cases of vCJD, it may be difficult to justify the high cost of risk reduction strategies. [source]

MIGRATION, MEDICAL AID AND WELFARE*

AUSTRALIAN ECONOMIC PAPERS, Issue 4 2007
WATARU KUREISHI
This paper constructs a simple rural-urban migration model that explicitly incorporates the interactions between the individual's migration decision, the risk of incurring an infectious disease and unemployment. We show that providing a subsidy for health investment in urban regions in the form of medical aid does not improve individual welfare. This is because it induces further urban migration, increases the risk of infection and unemployment, and offsets completely the positive cost-reduction effect. [source]