Department of Public Health, University of Otago, PO Box 7343, Wellington South, New Zealand.
Bull World Health Organ. 2012 Jul 1;90(7):532-9. doi: 10.2471/BLT.11.097584. Epub 2012 May 8.
To develop a new method for estimating the cost to governments of enacting public health legislation.
We adopted a central government perspective in estimating costs. The parliamentary cost of legislative acts and regulations in New Zealand was calculated from the proportion of parliamentary time devoted to law-making (i.e. sitting days in the debating chamber), and the cost of associated policy advice from government agencies was calculated from the proportion of documented policy issues related to law-making. The relative costs of acts and regulations were estimated from the number of pages in the legislation.
We estimated that, between 1999 and 2010, 26.7% of parliamentary resources and 16.7% of policy advice from government agencies were devoted to generating new laws in New Zealand. The mean cost of an act was 2.6 million United States dollars (US$; 95% uncertainty interval, UI: 1.5 to 4.4 million) and the mean cost of a regulation was US$ 382 000 (95% UI: 22 000 to 665 000). For comparison, the average cost of a bill enacted by the 50 state governments in the United States of America between 2008 and 2009 was US$ 980 000.
We were able to estimate the cost of new legislation in New Zealand. Our method for estimating this cost seemed to capture the main government costs involved and appears to be generally applicable to other developed countries. Ideally such costs should be included in economic evaluations of public health interventions that involve new legislation.
开发一种估算政府颁布公共卫生法规成本的新方法。
我们采用中央政府的视角来估算成本。新西兰议会立法和法规的议会成本是根据立法所占用的议会时间比例（即辩论厅的开会天数）来计算的，政府机构相关政策建议的成本是根据与立法相关的政策问题比例来计算的。法规的相对成本是根据立法的页数来估算的。
我们估计，1999 年至 2010 年期间，议会资源的 26.7%和政府机构政策建议的 16.7%用于在新西兰制定新法律。一项法案的平均成本为 260 万美元（95%不确定区间，95%UI：150 万至 440 万美元），一项法规的平均成本为 38.2 万美元（95%UI：2.2 万至 66.5 万美元）。相比之下，2008 年至 2009 年美国 50 个州政府颁布的法案平均成本为 98 万美元。
我们能够估算新西兰新立法的成本。我们估算这种成本的方法似乎捕捉到了涉及的主要政府成本，并且似乎普遍适用于其他发达国家。理想情况下，这种成本应包含在涉及新立法的公共卫生干预措施的经济评估中。
