Quantifying the Impact of Chikungunya and Dengue on Tourism Revenues

Health economists have traditionally quantified the burden of vector-borne diseases (such as chikungunya and dengue) as the sum of the cost of illness and the cost of intervention programmes. The objective of this paper is to predict the order of magnitude of possible reduction in tourism revenues if a major epidemic of chikungunya or dengue were to discourage visits by international tourists, and to prove that even a conservative estimate can be comparable to or even greater than the cost of illness and intervention programmes combined, and therefore should not be ignored in the estimation of the overall burden. [Working Paper No. 2009-02-03]