Ashley Elizabeth M, Nardinelli Clark, Lavaty Rosemarie A
Food and Drug Administration, Silver Spring, MD, USA.
Health Econ. 2015 May;24(5):617-24. doi: 10.1002/hec.3040. Epub 2014 Feb 25.
For products such as tobacco and junk food, where policy interventions are often designed to decrease consumption, affected consumers gain utility from improvements in lifetime health and longevity but also lose utility associated with the activity of consuming the product. In the case of anti-smoking policies, even though published estimates of gross health and longevity benefits are up to 900 times higher than the net consumer benefits suggested by a more direct willingness-to-pay estimation approach, there is little recognition in the cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness literature that gross estimates will overstate intrapersonal welfare improvements when utility losses are not netted out. This paper presents a general framework for analyzing policies that are designed to reduce inefficiently high consumption and provides a rule of thumb for the relationship between net and gross consumer welfare effects: where there exists a plausible estimate of the tax that would allow consumers to fully internalize health costs, the ratio of the tax to the per-unit long-term cost can provide an upper bound on the ratio of net to gross benefits.
对于烟草和垃圾食品等产品，政策干预通常旨在减少消费，受影响的消费者从终身健康和寿命的改善中获得效用，但也会因消费该产品的行为而失去效用。以反吸烟政策为例，尽管已公布的总体健康和寿命效益估计比更直接的支付意愿估计方法所显示的消费者净效益高出多达900倍，但在成本效益和成本效果文献中，几乎没有人认识到，当未扣除效用损失时，总体估计会夸大个人福利的改善。本文提出了一个分析旨在减少低效高消费政策的通用框架，并给出了消费者净福利效应与总体福利效应之间关系的经验法则：如果对能让消费者充分内化健康成本的税收有合理估计，那么该税收与单位长期成本的比率可以为净效益与总体效益的比率提供一个上限。
