Currie Janet, Lin Wanchuan, Meng Juanjuan
Princeton University.
Guanghua School of Management, Peking University.
J Dev Econ. 2014 Sep 1;110:39-51. doi: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2014.05.006.
China has high rates of antibiotic abuse and antibiotic resistance but the causes are still a matter for debate. Strong physician financial incentives to prescribe are likely to be an important cause. However, patient demand (or physician beliefs about patient demand) is often cited and may also play a role. We use an audit study to examine the effect of removing financial incentives, and to try to separate out the effects of patient demand. We implement a number of different experimental treatments designed to try to rule out other possible explanations for our findings. Together, our results suggest that financial incentives are the main driver of antibiotic abuse in China, at least in the young and healthy population we draw on in our study.
中国存在抗生素滥用和抗生素耐药率高的问题，但其原因仍存在争议。医生开处方时强烈的经济激励可能是一个重要原因。然而，患者需求（或医生对患者需求的看法）也经常被提及，并且可能也起到了作用。我们通过一项审计研究来检验消除经济激励的效果，并试图区分出患者需求的影响。我们实施了一些不同的实验性治疗措施，旨在排除对我们研究结果的其他可能解释。总体而言，我们的结果表明，经济激励是中国抗生素滥用的主要驱动因素，至少在我们研究中所涉及的年轻健康人群中是如此。
