🤖 AI Summary
Traditional health evaluation metrics, such as QALYs and PALYs, struggle to simultaneously account for equity and productivity contributions. This work proposes a unified framework that integrates welfare economics and health measurement theory through a normative axiomatic approach. Within this framework, a new class of evaluation functions is developed, satisfying scale invariance and the Pigou-Dalton transfer principle. The authors derive a tractable power-form representation of these functions, offering a coherent basis for assessing interventions that jointly affect health and productive capacity. By doing so, the framework overcomes key limitations of existing metrics, providing a principled balance between efficiency and fairness in health policy evaluation.
📝 Abstract
This paper develops a unified framework for evaluating health outcomes that jointly incorporates equity and productivity. Extending beyond traditional QALYs, PALYs, and the more recent PQALYs, we introduce a broader class of evaluation functions that integrate equity- and productivity-sensitive conditions. By imposing several normative criteria, including independence from measurement scales and Pigou-Dalton transfer principles, we obtain tractable power-form representations. In balancing equity and efficiency, the framework provides a coherent foundation for assessing interventions in contexts where both health and productive capacity are at stake.