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Infectious Disease Risks in Developing Countries: A Non-Market Valuation Exercise
Title
Infectious Disease Risks in Developing Countries: A Non-Market Valuation Exercise.
Creator
Samajpati, Shreejata, Gerking, Shelby, Dickie, Mark, Caputo, Michael, Roy, Joyashree, University of Central Florida
Abstract / Description
This dissertation focuses on the non-market valuation of health-risks of malaria, an infectious disease that imposes a substantive public health burden across the globe, hitting particularly hard the tropical developing nations of Africa and Asia. The United Nations Millennium Development Goals include malaria control as a priority and large investments are underway to promote effective prevention and treatment. Despite such concerted supply-side efforts, malaria-related mortality and...
Show moreThis dissertation focuses on the non-market valuation of health-risks of malaria, an infectious disease that imposes a substantive public health burden across the globe, hitting particularly hard the tropical developing nations of Africa and Asia. The United Nations Millennium Development Goals include malaria control as a priority and large investments are underway to promote effective prevention and treatment. Despite such concerted supply-side efforts, malaria-related mortality and morbidity still abound due to a complex interface of factors like climate-change, poverty, inadequate control behavior, infection and prevention externalities, parasite resistance etc. This research project digs into the demand-side of the health problem, considers the "externality" dimension to prevention, and primarily asks the question: how do individuals in developing countries view competing disease-control (prevention) measures, viz. a publicly-administered community-level malaria control measure as against private preventive choices. A theoretical model is developed to help explore the public-private interplay of health risks of malaria. The malaria-endemic regions of Kolkata (India) and its rural fringes comprise the site for an empirical investigation. A field survey (Malaria Risk and Prevention Survey, October-December, 2011) incorporating a mix of stated and revealed preference techniques of health valuation is implemented. Risk-perceptions of respondents are elicited using a measurable visual-aid and individuals' perceived valuations of health-risk reductions, randomly offered with the public and private health treatments, are empirically ascertained. Using a Likelihood Ratio Test on the structural risk parameters, it is seen that individuals' valuations of health risk reductions are the same across the private and public treatments. The comparative valuation exercise, thus, corroborates the externality dimension to malaria control, calling for greater public action to combat malaria. The viability of such a scaled-up public malaria program, in the context of Kolkata, is discussed by comparing the public treatment willingness to pay estimates with the annual estimated costs that the Kolkata Municipal Corporation, the civic body in the city of Kolkata, maintains on account of vector control. Results from the comparative valuation exercises also support the idea that private prevention is generally responsive to prevention costs, indicating the importance of price incentives to induce greater prevention. The issues of health valuation and price sensitivity are further explored across various split-samples differentiated on the basis of socio-economic attributes, disease exposure, actual prevention efforts and perceived malaria risks of survey respondents. Such auxiliary exercises help analyze the valuation question in greater depth, and generate policy insights into the potential factors that shape private prevention behavior.
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Date Issued
2012
Identifier
CFE0004594, ucf:49195
Format
Document (PDF)
PURL
http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0004594
Three essays on applications of intrahousehold resource allocation models
Title
Three essays on applications of intrahousehold resource allocation models.
Creator
Pamornpathomkul, Santikorn, Dickie, Mark, Gerking, Shelby, Scrogin, David, Rutstrom, Elisabet, University of Central Florida
Abstract / Description
This dissertation consists of three chapters on the topic of intrahousehold resource allocation models. The first chapter tests the unitary and general collective models of intrahousehold resource allocation for various household compositions. I find that, for the quasi-quadratic Engel curve specification, the overall results support the previous findings in the literature that the unitary model fails to explain how resources are allocated for all household types. However, when using the...
Show moreThis dissertation consists of three chapters on the topic of intrahousehold resource allocation models. The first chapter tests the unitary and general collective models of intrahousehold resource allocation for various household compositions. I find that, for the quasi-quadratic Engel curve specification, the overall results support the previous findings in the literature that the unitary model fails to explain how resources are allocated for all household types. However, when using the QUAIDS specification, the results can reject the unitary model only for smaller-sized households. The general collective model, on the other hand, cannot be rejected in either quasi-quadratic or QUAIDS and not in any of the household compositions. Overall, the results support the general collective model of household behavior rather than the unitary model.The second chapter derives and tests restrictions imposed by the collective model for households with more than two decision-makers in the absence of price variation. It extends the two-decision-maker model in chapter one to derive the testable restrictions for households with multiple decision makers using unconditional demand systems. Moreover, for comparison, a particular type of demand system that is conditional on distribution factors is also estimated as an alternative way to test the collective model. The results show that neither unconditional nor conditional demand systems can reject Pareto efficiency. Therefore, both approaches provide consistent outcomes supporting the hypothesis that the multiple-decision-maker households in Thailand behave in the Pareto efficient manner predicted by the collective model.Finally, my third chapter attempts to examine how one can exploit household-level consumption data to recover information about individual household members for situations with no price variation. By combining consumption data from single and couple households, I am able to estimate the resource shares and indifference scales (a variation of the standard equivalence scales in the collective settings) for each household member via a system of Engel curves. The results show that, in Thailand, wives are likely to have higher resource shares than husbands in the married-couple households, while wives with higher education have the ability to extract more household resources. However, resource shares for wives are smaller for older-married compared to younger-married couples. Moreover, if a female were to live alone, she would need approximately three-quarters of the couple's income to reach the same indifference curve, and hence the same standard of living, that she would attain as a wife in the married-couple household.
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Date Issued
2011
Identifier
CFE0004150, ucf:49057
Format
Document (PDF)
PURL
http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0004150