1. Introduction

The cost-of-illness (COI) studies convert the burdens associated with certain illnesses into economic and monetary values so as to measure the socioeconomic costs that are inevitably incurred by a given society in association with certain illnesses. The estimated costs provided by COI studies provide an important basis for estimating the amounts of public health resources spent and productivity losses incurred and thereby make it possible to quantify the socioeconomic burdens that illnesses impose on society in general. In other words, COI studies provide important information for determining the socioeconomic costs of illnesses, which, in turn, makes it possible to better prioritize public health policy tasks and issues. In particular, the findings of such studies tend to be straightforward and intuitive and aid policymakers in making related decisions.

In this chapter, we review the diverse methodologies and techniques for estimating the socioeconomic burden of disease, which is widely used in the established literature all over the world, and compare the pros and cons of each. Furthermore, this chapter introduces a real-world example of estimating the national economic burden of disease by using the National Health Insurance (NHI) data.
