Price Subsidies, Diagnostic Tests, and Targeting of Malaria Treatment: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Cohen, Jessica; Dupas, Pascaline; Schaner, Simone
• 署名单位: Harvard University; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Brookings Institution; Stanford University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Dartmouth College
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0002-8282
• DOI: 10.1257/aer.20130267
• 发表日期: 2015
• 页码: 609-645
• 关键词: CASE-MANAGEMENT; HEALTH; adoption; welfare; kenya; cost

摘要

Both under-and over-treatment of communicable diseases are public bads. But efforts to decrease one run the risk of increasing the other. Using rich experimental data on household treatment-seeking behavior in Kenya, we study the implications of this trade-off for subsidizing life-saving antimalarials sold over-the-counter at retail drug outlets. We show that a very high subsidy (such as the one under consideration by the international community) dramatically increases access, but nearly one-half of subsidized pills go to patients without malaria. We study two ways to better target subsidized drugs: reducing the subsidy level, and introducing rapid malaria tests over-the-counter.