Is the gap between micro- and macroeconomic assessments in health care well understood? The case of vaccination and potential remedies

摘要

Vaccination is an established intervention that reduces the burden and prevents the spread of infectious diseases. Investing in vaccination is known to offer a wide range of economic and intangible benefits that can potentiate gains for the individual and for society. The discipline of economics provides us with microeconomic and macroeconomic methods for evaluating the economic gains attributed to health status changes. However, the observed gap between micro and macro estimates attributed to health presents challenges to our understanding of health-related productivity changes and, consequently, economic benefits. The gap suggests that the manner in which health-related productive output is quantified in microeconomic models might not adequately reflect the broader economic benefit. We propose that there is a transitional domain that links the micro- and macroeconomic improvement attributed to health status changes. Currently available economic evaluation methods typically omit these consequences, howev...