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April 23, 2012
Applied Welfare Analysis in Health
Location: Lausanne, Switzerland
Dates: April 23 to 27, 2012
Registration: Online until April 6, 2012
Course hompage: http://www.hec.unil.ch/iems/formation/phd
Prof. Alistair McGuire (London School of Economics)
Prof. Mireia Jofre-Bonet (City University of London)
Presentation:
Welfare economics concerns the means by which the desirability of different policy options can be judged, and provides the theoretical foundations for the economic evaluation techniques currently widely used in policy making.
The aim of this module is to revise the subject of welfare economics and extend it to incorporate recent advances in this topic.
Objectives:
This course will provide an overview of the concepts that are essential for the understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of welfare economics. It will also show how the different approaches are applied empirically.
By the end of the course, you will be familiar with what social welfare functions are and how welfare changes and the distributional implications associated to health care interventions are measured - including when there are no markets and/or prices for the goods and/or services involved.
You will be able to apply and understand evaluation techniques such as cost-effectiveness and cost-utility analysis, cost-benefit analysis and establish when recommendations emerging from those analyses are associated with gains in the social welfare function.
You will be acquainted with the different outcome measures as used in the health sector (Quality Adjusted Life Years, Disability Life Years, Health-Years Equivalents); the properties of the contingent valuation approach; the conjoint/stated preference analysis approach; and estimation approaches for the marginal social cost of funds.
Finally, expected utility theory, decision theory, and optimal taxation will be examined in the light of cost-effectiveness analysis and welfare economics.
