A Commitment to Vaccination Index: Measuring Government Progress toward Global Immunization

Vaccination is among the most cost-effective health interventions and has attracted ever greater levels of investment from public and private funders. However, some countries, mainly populous lower-middle-income countries, are lagging behind in vaccination financing and performance.

In this paper, Amanda Glassman, Juan Ignacio Zoloa, and Denizhan Duran discuss the rationale for investing in vaccination and construct a metric to measure countries’ commitment to vaccination that would promote accountability and better tracking of performance.

Conceding data limitations, they find that populous middle-income countries, which stand to gain tremendously from increased vaccination uptake, show poor performance in vaccination outcomes and that donors may also benefit from higher marginal returns in these countries.

Data disclosure: The data underlying this paper are available as a data set.