Economics of self‐medication: theory and evidence

Abstract

A pervasive phenomenon in developing countries is that self-prescribed medications are purchased from drug vendors without professional supervision. In this article we develop a model of self-medicating behavior of a utility-maximizing consumer who balances the benefits and risks of self-medication. The empirical investigation focuses on the role of income and health insurance on the use of self-medication. Our data are from the World Bank's Living Standards Measurement Survey of Vietnam, 1997-1998. The results show that self-medication is an inferior good at high income levels and a normal good at low income levels, and it shows a strong and robust negative insurance effect.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 162 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.