Value of statistical life year in extreme poverty: a randomized experiment of measurement methods in rural Burkina Faso

Value of a Statistical Life Year (VSLY) provides an important economic measure of an individual's trade-off between health risks and other consumption, and is a widely used policy parameter. Measuring VSLY is complex though, especially in low-income and low-literacy communities. Using a large r...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Population health metrics 2021-11, Vol.19 (1), p.45-45, Article 45
Main Authors: Trautmann, Stefan T, Xu, Yilong, König-Kersting, Christian, Patenaude, Bryan N, Harling, Guy, Sié, Ali, Bärnighausen, Till
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Burkina Faso
Cost analysis
Cost-Benefit Analysis
Cost-effectiveness
Costs
Data Collection
Decision making
Design
Developing countries
Economic aspects
Estimates
Extreme poverty
GDP
Gross Domestic Product
Health aspects
Health risks
Health Services
Humans
LDCs
Life span, Productive
Measurement
Measurement methods
Methods
Payment cards
Poor
Population
Poverty
Price lists
Prices
Rural areas
Statistics
Surveillance
Valuation
Value of statistical life year
Willingness to pay
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Value of a Statistical Life Year (VSLY) provides an important economic measure of an individual's trade-off between health risks and other consumption, and is a widely used policy parameter. Measuring VSLY is complex though, especially in low-income and low-literacy communities. Using a large randomized experiment (N = 3027), we study methodological aspects of stated-preference elicitation with payment cards (price lists) in an extreme poverty context. In a 2 × 2 design, we systematically vary whether buying or selling prices are measured, crossed with the range of the payment card. We find substantial effects of both the pricing method and the list range on elicited VSLY. Estimates of the gross domestic product per capita multiplier for VSLY range from 3.5 to 33.5 depending on the study design. Importantly, all estimates are economically and statistically significantly larger than the current World Health Organization threshold of 3.0 for cost-effectiveness analyses. Our results inform design choice in VSLY measurements, and provide insight into the potential variability of these measurements and possibly robustness checks.
ISSN:1478-7954
1478-7954
DOI:10.1186/s12963-021-00275-y