Abstract
Despite the fact that over half of the world’s officially reported cases of AIDS were diagnosed in the United States, the burden of AIDS affects the developing countries even more than the industrialized ones. A number of developing countries, particularly in Africa and the Caribbean, face a devastating combination of a high incidence of AIDS, strained health systems, and stagnating economies. In a model similar to the work of Over, Bertozzi and Chin (1989), this paper presents a framework to measure the total economic impact of AIDS in a developing area and applies this framework to the island of Puerto Rico and its capital city of San Juan. The measurement of economic impact is needed to determine the magnitude of the problem of HIV infection, to rank that problem in relation to other health needs, and to guide prevention and control efforts.