Valuing health as development: going beyond gross domestic product [24.10.18]
GDP per capita is a narrow, inadequate metric for capturing the true, full value of health investments, say Victoria Fan and colleagues. In this paper, they sketch a proposal for constructing a wellbeing measure that is comparable to the HDI in what it captures without some of its shortcomings (BMJ 2018;363:k4371).
Original Paper
Victoria Y Fan 1, David E Bloom 2, Osondu Ogbuoji 3, Klaus Prettner 4, Gavin Yamey 3 (2018) Valuing health as development: going beyond gross domestic product. BMJ 2018; 363 doi: doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k4371 (Published 23 October 2018) Cite this as: BMJ 2018;363:k4371
Author affiliations
- Office of Public Health Studies, Myron B Thompson School of Social Work, University of Hawai′i at Mānoa, Honolulu, USA
- Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA
- Duke Global Health Institute, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
- University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany
Correspondence to: G Yamey gavin.yamey@duke.edu
Key messages
Gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and its rate of growth are simple, important indicators of the current state of the economy and have been measured for a long time
But GDP per capita is a narrow, inadequate metric for capturing the true, full value of health investments
GDP should not be used as a standalone measure, but rather alongside complementary indicators of progress—such as “health income” or “value of life years,” which both capture the economic value of health improvements
