Careful readers of yesterday's post on antimicrobial resistance might wonder whether I also prefer regulation as a solution for climate change. After all, the problems are superficially similar. Both antimicrobial resistance and climate change are listed among WHO's top ten global public health threats, and both involve negative externalities (where one person's actions make others worse off). Both problems will require concerted international action to properly address.
However, there is an important distinction between the two problems, which means that taxes or tradeable permits (such as the Emissions Trading Scheme) are likely to be effective solutions to climate change, but are less effective for antimicrobial resistance. That distinction may have gotten a little bit lost in yesterday's post.
In the case of climate change, all reductions in carbon emissions are good, in terms of reducing future climate change. So, any policy instrument that reduces carbons emissions is moving us towards the 'optimal' level of carbon emissions (which is not zero gross emissions - all of us emit carbon dioxide when we breathe, for example). The question then becomes, how do we reduce those emissions at the lowest cost to society? Taxes and tradeable permits are credible options for reducing emissions at the lowest cost, while regulation is not (a point that Eric Crampton has made many times, such as here).
Unlike carbon emissions, reducing all antibiotic use is not a good thing. Antibiotics are still needed to deal with infections. So, taxes and tradeable permits are not good instruments for reducing the problem of antimicrobial resistance, because we shouldn't want to reduce all antibiotic use, only inappropriate antibiotic use. So, as I noted in yesterday's post, antibiotic use in agriculture is an appropriate target for a tax to reduce use, but taxing all antibiotics used in medical care would likely make us all worse off.
Sometimes, regulation may actually be the best available option. But that sure doesn't mean that regulation is always the best available option.
Read more:
No comments:
Post a Comment