Paper #472

Title:

The significance of distributive effects in social assessment of health care

Authors:

Eva Rodríguez and José Luis Pinto

Date:

June 2000

Abstract:

In this paper we address the importance of distributive effects in the social valuation of QALY's. We propose a social welfare function that generalises the functions traditionally used in the health economic literature. The novelty is that, depending on the individual health gains, our function can represent either preferences for concentrating or preferences for spreading total gain or both together, an issue which has not been addressed until now. Based on an experiment, we observe that this generalisation provides a suitable approximation to the sampled social preferences.

Keywords:

QALY, distributive effects, social welfare function, inequality aversion

JEL codes:

I18, D61, D63

Area of Research:

Labour, Public, Development and Health Economics

CRES Series number:

13

Published in:

Health Economics, 11, (2002), pp. 43-53
With the title:
Measuring the Social Importance of Concentration or Dispersion of Individual Health Benefits

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