Abstract
This chapter reviews the economics of Avian Influenza and other zoonotic diseases and describes how externalities and market failures lead to suboptimal provision of disease prevention and control. It develops a prototype model of farm behavior that merges epidemiology and economics to provide a framework for analyzing how private incentives lead to a divergence between farmer optimization and social-welfare maximization. Conditions for optimal policy intervention are derived in an application to Avian Influenza and the distribution of economic benefits is derived. Policies for disease prevention and control are considered in the context of the economic model.
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Zilberman, D., Sproul, T.W., Sexton, S., Roland-Holst, D. (2012). The Economics of Zoonotic Diseases: An Application to Avian Flu. In: Zilberman, D., Otte, J., Roland-Holst, D., Pfeiffer, D. (eds) Health and Animal Agriculture in Developing Countries. Natural Resource Management and Policy, vol 36. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7077-0_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7077-0_4
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