How greater spending on preventive health can promote economic growth
EU member states face mounting fiscal pressure, from higher NATO defense spending targets and the costs of population aging, to the wind-down of the NextGenerationEU recovery instrument and the return of the Stability and Growth Pact's deficit and debt limits. Writing for the World Economic Forum, Harvard economist David Bloom and colleagues argue that greater spending on preventive health, far from adding to this burden, may be one of the more effective tools available for addressing it.
The core of the argument treats population health as a form of human capital with direct macroeconomic consequences: healthier adults work more, are more productive, and contribute more in taxes; healthier children learn more and earn more as adults; and healthier populations save, invest, and attract more foreign investment. The investment case is strongest for prevention: immunization, screening, early detection, and preventive medications, where returns are especially high. Adult immunization returns are estimated at up to 19 times their cost globally, and multiple European pediatric immunization programs have delivered benefit-cost ratios of up to €8.5 in value for every €1 spent, with most benefits realized within the first ten years.
The authors identify three factors likely to increase the value of preventive health spending further: AI accelerating vaccine development, vaccines' role in mitigating the health and economic costs of antimicrobial resistance, and population aging, where prevention extends working lives and reduces long-term care costs.
Yet preventive health still accounts for only around 3 percent of total health spending across the EU. The authors argue that the flexibility built into the EU's new economic governance framework gives member states room to treat preventive health as an investment rather than a cost, a win-win for both population health and economic resilience.
