At the 2021 GACD Annual Scientific Meeting, researchers, implementing partners, and funders met in communities of practice to explore cross-cutting issues.
A community of practice shares knowledge and experience, so that everyone taking part can advance their own and each other’s knowledge. By exchanging stories, problems, and solutions, the community of practice brings collective knowledge to key issues.
During Day 2’s community of practice session, our expert co-leads, Helen Weatherly, Kavita Singh, and Guillermo Paraje, introduced participants to the principles and utility of health economics.
In Part 3 of our blog series on the ‘science of scarcity’, we highlight the knowledge exchanged while discussing Guillermo’s experiences of tobacco control.
Health economics in tobacco control
Guillermo introduced the audience to his tobacco control work, which aims to assess how the use of economic tools (price and non-price related) can decrease tobacco consumption in Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, South Africa, and Vietnam.
Using nationally representative data source, Guillermo and his team have looked at the effect that prices have on tobacco consumption outcome variables. For example:
The sensitivity of prevalence to tobacco prices (i.e., by what percentage does prevalence decrease when tobacco prices increase by 10%).
The sensitivity of smoking onset (and in the case of Vietnam of cessation) to tobacco prices (i.e., how much time onset is delayed if tobacco prices increase by 10%).
Example from Chile: Their analysis indicated that the tobacco price increase postponed smoking onset by seven months. This is pertinent for tobacco control, as smoking onset tends to occur during a very limited age range and delaying the onset may prevent someone taking up tobacco smoking altogether.How expenditure on tobacco changed budget allocations to other products.
Example from Chile: Their analyses indicated that households that spent more on tobacco products allocated a lower proportion of their total income to health and education. This may have adverse intergenerational effects on health.
The team are also conducting a discrete choice economic experiment to disentangle the effect of different types of cigarette packaging on people’s choices, including estimating willingness-to-pay for not having them. By varying different attributes and prices, experiments like this are informative to policymakers who usually base decisions on informal tools.
Guillermo spoke further about moving evidence from policy to practice, noting that there is not a common strategy to influence policymakers – it depends on the country and the context. He and his team have participated in dissemination activities beyond the traditional peer reviewed journal article route to communicate their findings with the public via newspapers, TV, and radio.
Furthermore, there is a disconnect between economists and other social scientists – and little effort is made to overcome the barrier. In topics that are historically ‘marginal’ in the world of economics, such as tobacco control, there is ignorance among economists on the importance of such topics. The first step is to educate more traditionally-minded economists of the importance of public health and the value of health economics. The second step is a transdisciplinary agenda.
Discussion prompts
What channels of communication can or should be used to publicise findings of economic evaluations?
What are the issues and priority areas for the use of health economics to evaluate NCD programmes?
Read other parts of this blog series: Part 1 (an introduction to health economics) and Part 2 (a case study in cost effectiveness).
More resources
Visit the Global Health Economics Forum.
Explore the GACD Implementation Science e-Hub.