Including intangible costs into the cost-of-illness approach: a method refinement illustrated based on the PM2.5 economic burden in China

Abstract

The concentrations of particulate matter with aerodynamic diameters less than 2.5 µm (PM 2.5 ) and 10 µm (PM 10 ) is a widespread concern and has been demonstrated for 103 countries. During the past few years, the exposure-response function (ERf) has been widely used to estimate the health effects of air pollution. However, past studies are either based on the costof-illness or the willingness-to-pay approach, and therefore, either do not cover intangible costs or costs due to the absence of work. To address this limitation, a hybrid health effect and economic loss model is developed in this study. This novel approach is applied to a sample of environmental and cost data in China. First, the ERf is used to link PM 2.5 concentrations to health endpoints of chronic mortality, acute mortality, respiratory hospital admission, cardiovascular hospital admission, outpatient visits-internal medicine, outpatient visits-pediatrics, asthma attack, acute bronchitis, and chronic bronchitis. Second, the health effect of PM 2.5 is monetized into the economic loss. The mean economic loss due to PM 2.5 was much heavier in the North than the South of China. Furthermore, the empirical results from 76 cities in China show that the health effects and economic losses were over 4.98 million cases and 382.30 billion-yuan in 2014 and decreased dramatically compared with those in 2013. KeywordsPM 2.5 • Exposure-response function • Cost-of-illness method • Willingness-to-pay method • Health effects • Economic losses JEL Classification Q5 * Bangzhu Zhu

Real-world study of direct medical and indirect costs and time spent in healthcare in patients with chronic graft versus host disease

“…Beyond direct health care cost, indirect costs also have a significant contribution to the total cost of illness [27]. Studies published since 2010 have reported that cGVHD burden of illness translates into a higher cost to society and loss of productivity from those patients with cGVHD who are unable to work [16,28,29].…”

“…Additionally, there is a lack of European data on indirect costs, with the majority of data from North America [16,28,29]. Considering direct healthcare costs in parallel with the indirect cost [27] is important to provide a more integrated insight into the economic burden of cGVHD.…”

Analysis on Change of Precipitation pH and Chemical Characteristics of Acid Rain in Liaoning Province (2007�2018)

“…The ensuing phenomenon will appear in the atmospheric precipitation of inland cities, and the composition of sea salt ions is higher than that of coastal cities. Of course, the final conclusion needs further observation, analysis and verification [48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58].…”

Chaotic Arc Adaptive Grasshopper Optimization

“…Compared with other optimization algorithms, the GOA possesses the advantages of an uncomplicated structure, few control parameters, and simple implementation. There are many fields such as engineering optimization, image processing [43], multi fault condition monitoring [44], data science [45], air pollution concerns [46], and data clustering that can be solved by using an optimization process based on GOA. Many scholars worldwide have carried out many studies and improvements from multiple angles to cope with low speed, low-precision solutions, and quickly fall into local optima [47].…”