Inflation and Discounting

 IV. Health Policy Reference Desk >> F. Health Policy Methods >> Inflation and Discounting (last updated 5.5.2020)

Inflation

MeasuringWorth. There are two missions of this site. The first is to make available to the public the highest quality and most reliable historical data on important economic aggregates, with particular emphasis on nominal (current-price) measures, as well as real (constant-price) measures. The data presented here on the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, have been created using the highest standards of the fields of economics and history, and they were rigorously refereed by the most distinguished researchers in the fields. The second is to provide carefully designed comparators (using these data) that explain the many issues involved in making value comparisons over time.
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Discounting

Discounting in Economic Evaluations. Pharmacoeconomics. 2018; 36(7): 745–758 (full text online). Appropriate discounting rules in economic evaluations have received considerable attention in the literature and in national guidelines for economic evaluations. Rightfully so, as discounting can be quite influential on the outcomes of economic evaluations. The most prominent controversies regarding discounting involve the basis for and height of the discount rate, whether costs and effects should be discounted at the same rate, and whether discount rates should decline or stay constant over time. Moreover, the choice for discount rules depends on the decision context one adopts as the most relevant. In this article, we review these issues and debates, and describe and discuss the current discounting recommendations of the countries publishing their national guidelines. We finish the article by proposing a research agenda.