From private club to professional network: An economic history of the Health Economists' Study Group, 1972–1997

Abstract

HESG was founded in 1972 as part of a conscious effort to establish health economics as an identifiable sub-discipline. It is debatable whether the growth of health economics was demand-led or supplier-driven, but in either case the existence of a HESG played a vital role. HESG was founded as a private club, in the tradition of English gentlemen's clubs, designed to provide a forum for debate and an invisible, supportive faculty for health economists dispersed between different organisations throughout the UK. It was given impetus by public economists at the University of York, who were effectively academic entrepreneurs, motivated in part by private gain, but by their actions overcoming the free-rider problem that might otherwise have retarded the development of health economics. Over the course of its first 25 years, HESG has changed and its membership has grown and altered in composition - over this period, HESG has evolved from a private club to a professional network. It has made a vital contribution to the existence and form of health economics as a subdiscipline in the United Kingdom, and has in turn itself been influenced by the subdiscipline. As a subdiscipline, UK health economics in the 1990s generally draws on a small body of economic theory and is practised by a distinct, identifiable group of economists. This paper was commissioned by HESG, as a history of the organisation. It also analyses the foundation and evolution of HESG as an institutional arrangement designed to overcome a collective action problem.