The shift from an economy organized around GDP growth to one organized around wellbeing places public health at the center of political and economic priorities. Yet public health economics is still rarely treated as a core component of welfare economics, and the methods, metrics and institutions needed to evaluate policies for wellbeing, equity and sustainability remain underdeveloped.

This webinar, hosted by the Public Health Economics Section of the European Public Health Association (EUPHA), brings together three international perspectives from academic research, supranational institutions, and local policy implementation on how public health economics can contribute to bringing the wellbeing economy into the conversation.

Programme:

• Shehzad Ali (Canada Research Chair in Public Health Economics, Western University) – The conceptualisation and measurement of wellbeing: foundational concepts, competing frameworks, and the methodological challenges of moving from health outcomes to wellbeing outcomes in economic evaluation.
• Sabine Vuik (Divison of Public Health, OECD) – The health and economic benefits of tackling non-communicable diseases: drawing on the OECD's recent country-specific analyses for EU/EEA countries, evidence on how NCDs and their risk factors shape key dimensions of wellbeing, and the societal and economic gains from scaling up prevention and management.
• Brendan Collins (Head of Health Economics and Modelling, WHO Collaborating Centre on Investment for Health & Wellbeing, Public Health Wales) – Wellbeing economics and social value in Wales: practical implementation of the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act, social value approaches, and lessons from regional wellbeing economy work.

Together, the speakers will address the conceptual debate (capabilities, equity, and prevention), methodological developments (distributional cost-effectiveness analysis, WELLBYs, and tools fit for cross-sectoral evaluation), and the policy translation needed to embed public health economics in wellbeing budgets, Health in All Policies, and decisions in housing, mobility and the environment.

The session will close with audience Q&A and will be moderated by members of the steering committee of the EUPHA Public Health Economics section.