Council of Economic Advisers

This resource pack, curated by the Center for Health Decision Science, introduces the theory and practice of benefit-cost analysis. It is targeted towards advanced students as well as practitioners and those interested in teaching benefit-cost analysis. Benefit-cost analysis (also referred to as cost-benefit analysis) is a well-established and widely-used form of economic evaluation. It is designed to inform policy and other decisions by providing evidence on the consequences of alternative interventions. In benefit-cost analysis, all…

This article, published in Gates Open Research, examines the impact of a one-time large cigarette price increase, through an increase in excise tax, on health and financing outcomes in four Indian states. Extended cost-effectiveness analysis (ECEA) is used to estimate, across income quintiles, the life-years gained, treatment cost averted, number of men avoiding catastrophic health expenditures and extreme poverty, and additional tax revenue collected with a cigarette price increase to Indian Rupees (INR) 10 plus…

Health system strengthening (HSS) activities should accompany disease-targeting interventions in low/middle-income countries (LMICs). Economic evaluations provide information on how these types of investment might best be balanced but can be challenging. This paper conducted a systematic review to evaluate how researchers address these economic evaluation challenges. The authors searches produced 1978 studies, out of which they included 36. Most studies used data from prospective trials and calculated cost-effectiveness directly from these trial inputs, rather than…