Does public intervention in dealing with problems of mosquitoes/flies in India crowd out private initiatives?

ABSTRACT

The spread of vector-borne diseases poses considerable public health challenges in India, such that both government and private households engage in initiatives to tackle the problem. This study utilises two nationally representative datasets (2018 and 2012) to determine if action undertaken by state/local government(s) in India in tackling the problems of mosquitoes/flies is associated with a crowding out of private efforts in addressing the problem; or instead is associated with greater private action. Study findings reveal that local/state government action is associated with an increase in household effort in dealing with the problem of mosquitoes/flies. Action by state/local governments in India may convey information to households which may alter their decision-making calculus regarding returns on investments triggering an increase in private effort complementing the public effort. Accordingly, simple government-sponsored advertising campaigns may not be efficacious in promulgating desired behavioural responses. This study finds that direct government action aimed at mitigating the transmission of vector-borne diseases, together with investment in education, social infrastructure and health system interaction may provide positive information signals to households thus enhancing private investment in health-related activity.

KEYWORDS:

• Vector-borne disease
• India
• health investment
• crowding out
• information signalling

JEL CODES:

• H4
• H41
• D82
• I180
• H750

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Type of effort include taking measures to fix window flywire, prevent accumulation of surrounding water, use of smoke and/or mosquito repellent, electric bats etc.

² ‘Problems’ faced by households was such that “it generally disturbed the normal way of life, … like taking rest, reading, performing household chores etc.”.

³ ‘Type of effort by government include taking measures such as spraying chemicals, fogging etc.

⁴ In its original form, the survey data records different types of social infrastructure as categorical variables reflecting gradations of service provision. For ease of analysis and interpretation, we distil these categorical variables into a dichotomous format. Although not reported here, the results remain statistically consistent and with no loss of explanatory power when adopting the simpler dichotomous format. These results are available on request.

⁵ A very small proportion of households in 2018 (3.20%) and 2012 (1.93%) reported no problem of mosquitoes/flies (see appendix Table A1); upon which no question relating to government action was included in the survey. These observations were excluded from the analysis.

⁶ See Dasgupta (2005) for limitations in public policy response in India.

⁷ For ease of presentation, Table 1 does not present state-level dummy results.