When social goals meet economic goals: the double dividend of extending free access to healthcare in Uganda

In recent years, the need for a better access to health services has become a social objective in many sub-Saharan African countries that seek to achieve the Millennium Goals for Development. Yet such pursuits raise questions about the appropriate balance between the social goals and economic objectives of poverty reduction policies, such that measures promoting agricultural growth might appear as a more effective strategies. This article explores how an improvement of health subsidies policy in Uganda experiment might meet both these social and economic goals. Focusing on the relationship between farmers' health and agricultural productivity, we use a computable general equilibrium model and a non-parametric micro-simulation model to predict the effect of this policy. The results show that it is likely to increase both households' access to health care and growth processes. They also show that in a context marked by scarce budgetary resources, it is possible to maximise the impact of this policy by reallocating subsidies toward the categories of health care with the greatest impacts on workers' productivity or toward rural households.