A/70/297 (e.g., personal assistance services and service animals). However, many of these goods and services are not available through or covered by national social protection systems. 25 On the other hand, persons with disabilities may pay higher prices for accessing the same goods and services as other people (e.g., private health and life insurance, when available) and consume larger amounts of certain non-specialized goods and services, such as food, heating, personal care, laundry, and telephone and Internet services, thus incurring considerable extra costs. 26 30. Importantly, many of these extra costs are directly related to lack of accessibility. An obvious example is transportation, where a person with a disability may be obliged to use taxis on a daily basis owing to the non-accessibility of the public transport system. Lack of accessibility also reduces the options for obtaining other goods and services. For instance, persons with disabilities often incur considerably higher expenditures for basic items such as food or clothing because they have no alternative to shopping locally or relying on others, thus preventing them from benefiting from bargains. 27 Accessible services can also be more costly than their non-accessible equivalents. 31. While the extra cost of disability varies greatly depending on the availability and financial accessibility of goods and services, 28 researchers have calculated that it can amount to almost 50 per cent of an individual’s income. 29 A recent study on older persons with disabilities estimates that, on average, disability costs are approximately 65 per cent higher than the net weekly pre -disability household income. 30 In addition, the economic cost of living with a disability includes foregone benefits or opportunity costs (e.g., lost income of individuals with disabilities or of family members who cannot work, or who work less, if the household includes one or more persons with disabilities), 31 the impact of which depends on many factors, including the type of impairment, the household’s socioeconomic status, the individual’s work status and the policy context (e.g., the existence of disability benefits). 32. Accordingly, the extra cost of disability has significant consequences for persons with disabilities and may lead to a lower standard of living and to poverty when households cannot afford these expenditures. Contributions to the present report illustrate that many persons with disabilities cannot afford education and __________________ 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 15-12544 WHO and World Bank. D. Stapleton, A. Protik and C. Stone, Review of International Evidence on the Cost of Disability, Research Report No. 542 (London, Department of Work and Pensions, 2008); A. Zaidi and T. Burchardt, “Comparing incomes when needs differ: equivalization for the extra costs of disability in the U.K.”, in Review of Income and Wealth, No. 51 (1) (2005). Extra Costs Commission, “Driving down the extra costs disabled people face: interim report” (2015). S. Mitra, A. Posarac and B. Vick, see note 13. J. Cullinan, B. Gannon and S. Lyons, Estimating the Extra Cost of Living for People with Disabilities, in Health Economics, vol. 20 (5) (2011); P. Saunders, “The cost of disability and the incidence of poverty”, Discussion Paper No. 147, Social Policy Research Centre, University of New South Wales, 2006; Prashant Loyalka and others, “The costs of disability in China”, in Demography, 51 (1) (2014). M. Morciano, R. Hancock and S. Pudney, “Disability costs and equivalence scales in the older population”, ISER Working Paper Series, No. 2012-09 (University of Essex, Institute for Social and Economic Research, April 2012). M. Palmer and others, “The Economic Lives of People with Disabilities in Vietnam” (2015), available from http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0133623 . 11/25