Profiling the Provision Status of Health-Promoting Public Goods Against AIDS

It is well-known that the private provision of public goods results generally in collective underprovision. The same situation seems plausible in the case of combating HIV/AIDS. The desire to intervene effectively has been addressed by a lot of international negotiations. A landmark in international efforts is the Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS (UN 2001). It was adopted at the United Nations General Assembly Special Session in June 2001 (Department of HIV/AIDS Family and Community Health 2003, p. 10). For the first time governments from 189 states gathered to discuss a specific health problem. The Declaration describes the HIV/AIDS epidemic and its effects as well as desired interventions. Basic priorities are educating people, especially the youth; stopping mother-child-transmission; providing treatment to all those who are infected; developing an AIDS vaccine or a cure and alleviating the impacts of HIV/AIDS. Although specific time-bound targets exist for each of those aims, these agreements are not legally binding. Governments cannot be compelled to keep their promises since an enforcing authority is missing. Since autonomous governments primarily consider their national benefits, they fail to take positive cross-border effects into account. As a consequence, an efficient transnational provision level of health measures cannot be provided (Kremer 2006, p. 26; Kaul 2002, p. 27). However, this conclusion is based on the very strong assumption that the sum of individual efforts at the national level equals the global effort. The condition of a summation technology is not valid for every health-promoting public good as we know from Chap. 2.