Immunisation Policies in Australia: An Economic Analysis

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BSD113 ECONOMICS: ASSESSMENT ITEM TWO

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Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
Part A- Overview of child immunisation rate in Australia........................................................3
Part B- Economic theory that links the policy with efficiency..................................................4
Part C- Critical analysis.............................................................................................................5
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................5
Reference....................................................................................................................................7

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Introduction
Immunisation is a process to protect the citizen of the country from various diseases. This is
important to maintain a healthy and productive labour force in the future. The government
provides free vaccines for different diseases to different age group to make sure it does not
harm the health of the people. The government also carries out a regular revision of the
policies to incorporate new diseases and the use of technology. However, despite the efforts,
the government has hardly made any impact in terms of the result. The aim of this paper is to
discuss the immunisation policies of the government referring different economy theories that
bring about efficiency in the economy.
Part A- Overview of child immunisation rate in Australia
As per the current policies of the government, there is a National Immunisation Programme
(NIP) Schedule that carries out the processes. In terms of the data of the economy, the
coverage rate of immunisation has increased to 93% since the year 2008. However, the
national goal has not been reached yet. Moore, McCallum, Fathima, de Klerk, Liu, Snelling
& Gidding (2017) noted that the government had set a national coverage rate of 95% in the
year 2004, which is still far away. Since the year 2014, the immunisation has reduced to 91%
(Mahajan, Dey, Cook, Harvey, Menzies & Macartney, 2015). The same pattern has been seen
in the case of 2 years of old where the immunisation had been very stable until the year 2017
after which it started falling. However, one important thing that needs to be noted is that the
full immunisation rate of the 5-year-old children has improved by 13% since the year 2016
(Clothier, Crawford, Russell, Kelly & Buttery, 2017).
2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 2018
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Immunisation under the government scheme
1 year
2 year
5 years