What will be the future budgetary cost of AIDS treatment in poor countries? How will this future cost depend on the rate of scale-up, the success of treatment, the decision to fully fund second-line therapy, or on other features of the national policy environment? What is the cost-effectiveness of faster treatment scale-up? How large are these projected costs compared to other touchstone economic quantities in the same countries, such as government health expenditures? CGD Working Papers by senior fellow Mead Over and by other authors provide different answers to these questions, depending on their assumptions. This manual and the AIDSCost software package it documents can be used by courses in public health, development economics, or health economics to help students understand the contingency of answers to these questions on the underlying assumptions and on the policy choices of donors and of national governments. Instructors whose students have access to the Stata statistical software can assign projection exercises by, for example, asking each student to project the costs of a different country or asking them to explore sensitivity of treatment cost-effectiveness to variations in the success of treatment.
Download the manual here. Instructions for downloading the program and installing it from inside the user’s copy of Stata are contained in Appendix 1 of the manual. The authors encourage comments on their blog or as an e-mail to them, which will be considered for posting.
(Instructors and students may also be interested in data on past AIDS funding by PEPFAR, the World Bank and the Global Fund, access to which is available through CGD’s HIV/AIDS Monitor Initiative.)
