The value of vaccinations

By Tim Worstall | 17 October 2005

A new paper out in World Economics which looks at the value of vaccinations. Commentary from Owen Barder at the Center for Global Development on the paper itself and some earlier thoughts from Chris Dillow. The Economist also covered the paper and the main finding is this:

For their study, they and Mr Weston identified how vaccination, in particular, might increase wealth.

The first benefit was that healthy children are more likely to attend school and better able to learn. The second was that healthy workers are more productive. Both of these seem fairly obvious. Two other benefits are less so, however.

One is that good health promotes savings and investment. This is because healthy people both expect to live longer (which gives them an incentive to save) and actually do live longer (which gives them more time to save). The other is that good health - and, particularly, expectations about the good health of one's offspring - promotes the so-called demographic transition from large to small families that usually accompanies economic development. None of these factors, the researchers thought, had been properly taken account of in previous estimates of the cost-effectiveness of vaccination.

Chris Dillow adds the further thought that:

If children survive childhood illnesses, families can reach their optimum size with fewer births. And the fewer childbirths there are, the greater are the survival prospects for women. This in turn should increase the education of girls. There's no point educating these if they'll die in childbirth. But if they do survive, there's more value in educating them.

That would appear to mean that Gordon Brown has got something right with his International Finance Facility for Immunisation.

Simple vaccination will increase lifespans, reduce population growth, raise the value and thus prevalence of female education and remove one of the major causes of continuing poverty.