When developing allocation policies for infectious disease prevention, policymakers often set outcome-oriented targets and measure the policy's progress with repeated cross-sectional surveys. For example, the United Nations' Integrated Global Action Plan for Pneumonia and Diarrhea (GAPPD) recommended increasing water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) resources to reduce childhood diarrhea incidence and outlined a specific level of diarrhea incidence to achieve. For policymakers, the goal is to design an allocation rule that optimally allocates WASH resources to meet the outcome targets. The paper develops methods to estimate an optimal allocation rule that achieves these pre-defined outcome-oriented targets using repeated cross-sectional surveys. The estimated allocation rule helps policymakers optimally decide what fraction of units in a region should get the resources based on its characteristics. Critically, our estimated policies account for spillover effects within regions in the form of partial interference, and we characterize the policies' performance in terms of excess risk. We apply our methods to design Senegal's WASH policy to prevent diarrheal diseases using the 2014-2017 Demographic and Health Survey. We show that our policy not only outperforms competing policies but also provides new insights about how Senegal should design WASH policies to achieve its outcome targets.
翻译:在制定传染病预防分配政策时,决策者往往制定注重结果的目标,并通过反复的跨部门调查衡量该政策的进展,例如,联合国“肺炎和腹泻综合全球行动计划”建议增加水、环境卫生和个人卫生资源,以减少儿童腹泻发病率,并概述要达到的腹泻发病率的具体水平。对于决策者来说,目标是设计一个分配规则,最佳地分配讲卫生运动的资源,以达到成果指标。该文件制定了最佳分配规则,利用反复的跨部门调查来估计实现这些预先确定的面向结果的目标的最佳分配规则。估计分配规则有助于决策者根据其特点最佳地决定一个区域中哪些部分单位应当获得资源。关键是,我们估计的政策在区域内以部分干预的形式反映了外溢效应,我们用过度风险来描述政策的业绩。我们运用我们的方法设计塞内加尔的讲卫生政策,利用2014-2017年人口和健康调查来预防腹泻疾病。我们显示,我们的政策不仅超越了相互竞争的政策,而且还提供了塞内加尔如何实现新目标。