Liljas B
Department of Economics, Lund University, Sweden.
Pharmacoeconomics. 1998 Jan;13(1 Pt 1):1-7. doi: 10.2165/00019053-199813010-00001.
This article describes the components that should be included as indirect costs to be consistent with economic theory in studies conducted from a societal perspective. The recently proposed method of how to estimate indirect costs, the friction-cost approach, is shown to exclude many aspects of these indirect cost components. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that this approach rests on very strong assumptions about the individual's valuation of leisure and about the labour market. This approach does not, in most realistic circumstances, have a foundation in economic theory. It also shows that all indirect costs cannot be assumed to be included in the individual's reported utility weight for a health state [used to determine quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) values], as recently suggested by the US Panel for Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of Health and Medicine. Therefore, to be consistent with economic theory, neither the friction-cost approach nor the QALY approach can be recommended over the more commonly used human capital-cost approach for estimating the indirect costs of a disease in economic evaluations from a societal perspective.
本文描述了从社会角度进行的研究中，为与经济理论保持一致应作为间接成本纳入的组成部分。最近提出的估算间接成本的方法，即摩擦成本法，被证明排除了这些间接成本组成部分的许多方面。此外，还表明这种方法基于关于个人对休闲的估值以及劳动力市场的非常强的假设。在大多数现实情况下，这种方法在经济理论中缺乏依据。文章还表明，不能像美国卫生与医学成本效益分析小组最近所建议的那样，假定所有间接成本都包含在个人报告的健康状态效用权重中（用于确定质量调整生命年，即QALY值）。因此，为与经济理论保持一致，在从社会角度进行的经济评估中估算疾病的间接成本时，无论是摩擦成本法还是QALY法，都不能比更常用的人力资本成本法更值得推荐。
