Health economics

Global Price Tags

The WHO-CHOICE approach has been applied to support the production of resource needs estimates for multiple countries – so called global price tags – for a number of disease and programme-specific analyses. The use of consistent methodologies and price assumptions across studies, linking to the WHO-CHOICE database with uniform assumptions on costs, allows for comparability between estimates for different health areas.

A global price tag for the Health Sustainable Goals

In 2017, WHO published estimates for the costs and benefits of progressively expanding health services in order to reach 16 Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) health targets in 67 low- and middle-income countries that account for 75% of the world’s population.

The SDG Health Price Tag models two scenarios: an “ambitious” scenario in which investments are sufficient for countries to attain the health targets in the SDGs by 2030, and a “progress” scenario in which countries get two thirds or more of the way to the targets. Under the "ambitious" scenario, progressing towards UHC and achieving the SDG health targets would require new investments increasing over time from an initial US$ 134 billion annually to reach $371 billion, or $58 per person, by 2030.

In 2019, WHO published Guide Posts for Investment in Primary Health Care in low-and middle-income countries.

The aim was to examine what additional investments are needed across low and middle-income countries, to achieve target levels of health system performance for PHC. The results indicate that roughly an additional $214 billion would be required to strengthen PHC delivery platforms and expand coverage of a set of 140 interventions across 67 low- and middle-income countries. This is equivalent to an average additional $34 investment per person - suggesting that low-income and lower-middle-income countries would need to at least double current spending on PHC to universally provide essential PHC services. Equipping health systems to deliver PHC would require constructing about 415,000 health facilities and boosting the health workforce across these countries, such that it rises from 5.6 health workers to 7.8 health workers per 1000 population.