Resources Repository
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ArticlePublication 2023Top and Bottom Longevity of Nations
Similar to the study of the distribution of income within countries, population-level health disparities can …
Similar to the study of the distribution of income within countries, population-level health disparities can be examined by analyzing the distribution of age at death. This article exposes a characterization of the age-at-death distribution across populations with a focus on the lower and upper tails of the distribution. These metrics, specifically the gap measures in age and share across the 10th and 90th percentiles of the distribution, enable a systematic comparison of national performances, which…
Priority Setting/Ethics | North America | Europe -
ArticlePublication 2021Toward Universal Health Coverage Post-COVID-19
During the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond, advancement toward universal health coverage will become more difficult …
During the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond, advancement toward universal health coverage will become more difficult for many countries, demonstrating that locally led priority setting is urgently needed to provide health services with appropriate financial protection to all. Resources are limited and no national constituency can provide an unlimited number of services to their whole population in a sustainable manner, so rationing and setting priorities for the selection of interventions to be included in a defined…
Priority Setting/Ethics | Policy/Regulation | Global -
ArticlePublication 2021Distributional Accounting Impact Model of Tobacco Taxation
As with other ‘sin taxes’, tobacco taxes are generally regarded as a highly cost-effective mechanism …
As with other ‘sin taxes’, tobacco taxes are generally regarded as a highly cost-effective mechanism to reduce consumption while also considered to be regressive. This dichotomy undermines efforts to fully implement tobacco taxes at levels recommended by the WHO due to concerns of fairness. This article demonstrates when there are circumstances in which the impacts of additional tobacco taxes are not regressive, using a standard income-share accounting definition of tax burden. The authors apply mathematical…
Mathematical Models | Policy/Regulation -
ArticlePublication 2020Broader Economic Value of School Feeding Programs
Globally, there are 370 million children receiving school meals every day. Coverage is least in …
Globally, there are 370 million children receiving school meals every day. Coverage is least in low-income countries, where the need is greatest and where program costs are viewed as high in comparison with the benefits to public health alone. This article explores the policy implications of including the returns of school feeding to other sectors in an economic analysis. The authors develop an economic evaluation methodology to estimate the costs and benefits of school feeding…
Costing Methods | Child/Nutrition | Global -
ArticlePublication 2021COVID-19 Mortality and Self-Imposed Behavior Change/Government Regulations
Countries have adopted different approaches, at different times, to reduce the transmission of COVID-19. Cross-country …
Countries have adopted different approaches, at different times, to reduce the transmission of COVID-19. Cross-country comparison could indicate the relative efficacy of these approaches. This article assesses various nonpharmaceutical interventions, comparing the effects of voluntary behavior change and of changes enforced via official regulations, by examining their impacts on subsequent death rates. Voluntarily reduced mobility, occurring prior to government policies, decreases the percent change in deaths per day by 9.2% (95% confidence interval [CI] 4.5–14.0).…
Health Outcomes | Infectious Diseases | Policy/Regulation | Global -
ArticlePublication 2021Health Gains and Financial Protection from HPV Vaccination
High out-of-pocket medical expenses for cervical cancer can lead to catastrophic health expenditures and medical …
High out-of-pocket medical expenses for cervical cancer can lead to catastrophic health expenditures and medical impoverishment in many low-resource settings. This article uses a static cohort model that captures the main features of HPV vaccines and population demographics to project health and economic outcomes associated with routine HPV vaccination in Ethiopia. The findings show that, assuming 100% vaccine efficacy against HPV-16/18 and 50% vaccination coverage, routine HPV vaccination could avert up to 970 000 cases…
Priority Setting/Ethics | Microsimulation | Infectious Diseases | Sub-Saharan Africa -
ArticlePublication 2021Health Benefit Package Design
Policymakers face difficult choices over which health interventions to publicly finance. This article presents an …
Policymakers face difficult choices over which health interventions to publicly finance. This article presents an approach to health benefits package design that accommodates explicit tradeoffs between improvements in health and provision of financial risk protection. The authors designed a mathematical optimization model to balance gains in health and financial risk protection across candidate interventions when publicly financed. The optimal subset of interventions selected for inclusion was determined with bi-criterion integer programming conditional on a budget…
Priority Setting/Ethics | Mathematical Models | Global -
ArticlePublication 2022Out-of-Pocket Spending and Catastrophic Health Expenditures
Universal health coverage aims to provide access to health services for all without financial hardship. …
Universal health coverage aims to provide access to health services for all without financial hardship. Moving toward universal coverage while ensuring financial risk protection from out-of-pocket health expenditures is a critical objective of the Sustainable Development Goal for Health. In tracking country progress toward universal health coverage, analysts and policymakers usually report on two summary indicators of lack of financial risk protection: the prevalence of catastrophic health expenditures and the prevalence of impoverishing health expenditures.…
Priority Setting/Ethics | Global -
ArticlePublication 2021Incorporating Equity in Infectious Disease Modeling: Measles
Deterministic compartmental models of infectious diseases like measles typically reflect biological heterogeneities in the risk …
Deterministic compartmental models of infectious diseases like measles typically reflect biological heterogeneities in the risk of infection and severity to characterize transmission dynamics. Given the known association of socioeconomic status and increased vulnerability to infection and mortality, it is also critical that such models further incorporate social heterogeneities. This article explores the influence of integrating income-associated differences in parameters of traditional dynamic transmission models. The authors developed a measles “SIR” model, in which the
Priority Setting/Ethics | Dynamic Transmission