Letters
New measures can help to measure economic "externalities"
EDITOR,--Peter Draper and Hugo Crombie ask whether the health sector can make a useful contribution to macroeconomic policy.1 This marks an important divergence from the school of thinking that health matters should be treated in economic terms entirely as consumption with no (monetised) return on expenditure.An economic framework which understands how health outcomes themselves feed back into the process of sustainable wealth creation offers a starting point. For the purpose of discussion, we have, for example, created a pilot index of sustainable economic welfare for the United Kingdom.2 Starting from a standard measure of personal consumption, the index makes a series of adjustments for factors which relate to human welfare and environmental sustainability. While the index does not purport to establish a single number as "true" welfare, it does allow an important assessment of relative performance over time.
Applied to the British economy, the index shows a striking difference
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- Health and economic policy
- Peter Draper and Hugo Crombie
BMJ 1995 311: 1-2.[Extract] [Full Text]
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