Guidelines for rapid estimation of the direct and indirect costs of HIV infection in a developing country

The economic impact of AIDS may be especially severe in developing nations because of the additional burden on scarce health care resources and the potential loss of human capital. We describe a methodology for estimating the direct and indirect costs of HIV infection. Our approach is designed for the typical environment of international economic consulting, where time is short, and data sparse. We focus on HIV rather than AIDS because the only way now known to prevent AIDS is to prevent HIV infection.