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Full text PDF - International Policy Network

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232 Fighting the Diseases of Povertyfinance the introduction of anticipated vaccines covering pneumococcaldisease, rotavirus, and meningococcal A/C conjugate. Thisprogram will operate in 75 low-income countries with a combinedpopulation of 3.8 billion from 2005–2020, and will cost $13 billion.We examine the likely effect of the program on worker productivityat the individual level. The second study covers efforts in the Philippinesto immunize children with DTP, TB, polio, and measlesvaccines. It measures vaccines’ effects on children’s cognitive development,an important determinant of adult earnings.The countries involved in the GAVI immunization program sufferfrom high rates of child mortality. In countries that are not coveredby the program, there are fewer than 10 child deaths per thousandlive births. In the GAVI countries, there are over 65 deaths perthousand. GAVI estimates that its program will reduce child mortalityby 4 deaths per thousand live births in 2005, rising to 12 perthousand by 2020 as the campaign expands.We used a life table to translate averted deaths into increasedprobability of adult survival (the proportion of 15 year olds whoreach age 60), and found that the GAVI program will increase theadult survival rate by 5 per 1,000 initially and by 16 per 1,000 by2020 (life expectancy will increase by half a year initially and by oneand a half years by the end of the program).To translate the latter into growth of wages and income percapita, we used estimates in the economics literature from Shastryand Weil (2003) and Weil (2005) (Shastry & Weil 2002) that show thelink between health and wages in individuals. 5 This analysis showsthat for a group of 1000 adults, for each additional person survivingfrom age 15 to 60, average wages rise by 0.179 per cent. Based onthe assumption that labor productivity and wages account for twothirdsof national income (Hall & Jones, 1999), we calculate that eachextra surviving adult in a group of 1000 boosts income per capita by0.119 per cent.From this figure, we calculate that the average percentageincrease in income for the children whose immunization coverageincreases through the GAVI program will rise from 0.78 per cent in

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