Smita Srinivas’s (2021) chapter ‘A New Economics for Health’ in Mehdi and Rajan (Eds.) Health of the Nation: Perspectives for a New India (Oxford University Press) focuses on the urgent need to reflect the real-world and move toward a non-equilibrium, institutionally dynamic health economics.
“The knowledge intensity of health sub-fields, and the technology intensity of the industry thus play vital roles in growing uncertainty, speed, information asymmetries, and competition among firms, and consequently rejects traditional health economics [..]. Dramatic differences in the health system concerning contingent technological advances open up across countries as well as in single countries across time. These are not explained by cost or efficiency considerations alone [..] Consequently, as technological advances grow and equipment and methods increasingly specialist and narrow, economics ceases to be the simple cost calculus of cost–benefit analysis, neither a market failure threshold for state intervention, nor indeed one that can rely on equilibrium analysis in fast-moving technological domains.”