Economic valuations in global health

Abstract

This paper deals with three issues concerning economic valuation in global health. First, we argue that the economic value of health delivery in resource-limited settings is not fully captured through the adding up of successive assessments of individual interventions. Second, we suggest that economic valuations can be used to identify social barriers to the success of health technologies in resource-limited settings. Third, we briefly discuss new directions for research on economic valuations given the interdependency between poor health and economic impoverishment.

Keywords:

• economics
• valuations
• global health
• inequality
• resource-limited settings

Notes

1. Carlyle first called economics a ‘dismal science’ in a painfully racist 1849 essay in which he argued that liberating slaves led to squalor because the forces of supply and demand insufficiently supported those who were freed. He was writing about Haiti and other Caribbean societies with a purpose to persuade the liberal ‘philanthropists’ of England that slavery should be re-instituted. This argument was persuasively refuted by John Stuart Mill among others; see Carlyle (1849).

2. The leading definitions of ‘value’ in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) emphasise economics, and every definition refers to equivalence, fairness, equity or rank. ‘The material or monetary worth of a thing; the amount at which it may be estimated in terms of some medium of exchange or other standard of a similar nature’. See www.oed.com [Accessed 21 March 2007] for ‘value, n.’, definition 1b. The first four major definitions of value in the OED emphasise monetary comparisons. The next two deal with personal qualities such as rank and status, and the final two deal with measurement and analysis.

3. Part 1, Article 7 of Annex 1C of the TRIPS Agreement is available at www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/27-trips_03_e.htm; see Delgado et al. (2007).