GTAP Resources: Resource Display
| GTAP Resource #7901 |
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"Does a Healthy Diet a Day Keep the Economic Burden Away? A Multi-Pathway Modelling Assessment of the Economic Benefits of Healthy Diets" Authors: Laborde, David and Elsa Olivetti Abstract Diet-related health burdens entail major adverse economic implications, notably through hidden losses in labour productivity. Advances in nutrition science and epidemiology have strengthened evidence on the multiple pathways through which diets affect health over the life course. These pathways extend beyond diet-related diseases to include micronutrient deficiencies and immune impairment, mental-health deterioration, metabolic dysfunction and noncommunicable disease risk, as well as developmental and intergenerational effects. Yet most economic assessments capture only a subset of these pathways or their dynamic interactions, despite the fact that some generate long-lasting human capital losses while others primarily affect individuals during periods of unhealthy dietary intake. To address this gap, this paper provides an integrated assessment of the potential economic benefits of healthy diets. The analysis combines a recursive-dynamic global computable general equilibrium (CGE) model (MIRAGRODEP) with a household microsimulation module (POVANA) and health pathway models grounded in nutrition and epidemiology. By differentiating labour by sex and birth cohort, the framework captures key diet-related health pathways and their life-course effects. These pathways influence economic outcomes through short- and long-term labour productivity, labour-force participation, health expenditures, and human capital formation. This integrated approach enables the estimation of direct and indirect economic gains from dietary improvements, including higher labour productivity and labour supply alongside lower health-related costs. Beyond aggregate GDP effects, the analysis examines public-sector implications such as reduced healthcare spending, lower opportunity costs of public expenditure, and moderated public-debt trajectories, as well as distributional impacts across income groups and sex. |
| Resource Details () | GTAP Keywords | ||||||||||||||||
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- Economic analysis of poverty - Economic development - Economic growth - Health - Labor market issues |
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Public Access  PAPER - GTAP Resource 7901 (336.7 KB) Replicated: 0 time(s)Restricted Access No documents have been attached. Special Instructions No instructions have been specified. |
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Last Modified: 4/30/2026 12:56:16 PM
