Abstract
The standard reasons for market failure in the health sector – asymmetric information, moral hazard, externalities and public goods nature of a large number of health goods and services interventions – are central in the context of infectious diseases and make it imperative for governments to intervene to improve uptake of prevention services. Behavioral economics (BE) offers a framework to understand individual choices and preferences in the face of risk and uncertainty that might seem less than optimal from a public health perspective and make standard strategies ineffective to deal with the spread of infectious diseases.
Globally, countries have attempted to incorporate innovative strategies that elicit behavior changes in their public health programs, and evidence exists to indicate what might have worked and how.
This chapter reviews recent lessons from such experiences with prevention strategies that particularly focus on the behavioral dimensions of prevention for four diseases – HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis (TB), malaria, and diarrheal diseases, to understand which strategies worked better and why. These lessons are in turn applied to India as a case study to understand whether and to what extent such interventions have been used for prevention and control of these diseases, and what remains to be covered, to effectively address prevention and control of these four diseases.
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Gupta, I., Ramandeep (2020). Risk and Prevention of Infectious Disease. In: Zimmermann, K.F. (eds) Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57365-6_143-1
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