• Welfare foundations of cost-benefit analysis
  The Pareto criterion and other welfare criteria; market failure and non-market decision-making; social welfare functions
• The monetary value of health changes
  Private willingness-to-pay under certainty; health risks and the valuation of health under uncertainty; altruistic willingness-to-pay.
• The resource consequences of health changes
  Valuing resource consequences due to changes in morbidity and mortality in a private system under conditions of certainty and uncertainty; valuing resource consequences in a public system under certainty and uncertainty.
• Valuing health: the revealed preference approach
  Wage-risk studies; the insurance approach; hedonic property value studies; implied values from observed trade-offs between time and safety.
• Valuing health: the expressed preference approach
  Contingent valuation studies; open-ended vs binary questions; potential biases; empirical applications to health.
• The estimation of costs
  Programme costs - the costs of the intervention; market failures and the use of market prices; morbidity and mortality costs.
• Discounting
  Economic rationale of discounting; opportunity cost of capital vs time preference; criticisms of discounting.
• Cost-effectiveness analysis
  Measuring health outputs in non-monetary terms; intermediate vs final health outputs; decision rules with independent and mutually exclusive programmes; incremental analysis - defining the comparator; applied studies in the health sector.
• Cost-utility analysis
  Cost-effectiveness vs cost-utility analysis; quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs); eliciting utility weights for health states; QALYs, individual preferences and attitudes to risk; QALYs, health-year equivalents (HYEs) and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs); applied studies in the health sector.
• Equity issues
  Efficiency and equity; welfare criteria and equity; the role of equity in economic evaluation.
• Economic evaluation and policy-making
  Clinical practice guidelines; decision-making within health care organisations; new medical technologies; reimbursement decisions.

See Course Website: http://ecocomm.anu.edu.au/courses/course.asp?code=ECON8075

See Course Website: http://ecocomm.anu.edu.au/courses/course.asp?code=ECON8075

For further information please refer to http://ecocomm.anu.edu.au/courses/course.asp?code=ECON8075