Tetanus, Death, and Aerobics:
The Evaluation of Disease-Specific Public Health Interventions
William H. Dow, Jessica Homes, Tomas Philipson and Xavier X. Sala-i-Martin
Yale Economics Growth Center Working Paper # 736, August 1995
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 the 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 Classification
I0, I1
Keywords
Complementarities, Disease-specific Public Health Interventions, Tetanus Programs, Endogenous Mortality
This paper also circulates as
Disease complementarities and the evaluation of public health interventions, NBER working paper # 5216, August 1995