Columbia International Affairs Online: Working Papers

CIAO DATE: 09/2012

A Commitment to Vaccination Index: Measuring Government Progress toward Global Immunization

Amanda Glassman, Juan Ignacio Zoloa, Denizhan Duran

August 2012

Center for Global Development

Abstract

Vaccination is among the most cost-effective health interventions and has attracted ever greater levels of investment from public and private funders. However, some countries, mainly populous lower-middle-income countries, are lagging behind in vaccination financing and performance. In this paper, Amanda Glassman, Juan Ignacio Zoloa, and Denizhan Duran discuss the rationale for investing in vaccination and construct a metric to measure countries’ commitment to vaccination that would promote accountability and better tracking of performance. Conceding data limitations, they find that populous middle-income countries, which stand to gain tremendously from increased vaccination uptake, show poor performance in vaccination outcomes and that donors may also benefit from higher marginal returns in these countries.