Visit the MOVE Simulator

There is significant interest in quantifying the value of good health to justify increased investment in health and health systems. However, demonstrating the economic value of good health for older people presents unique challenges. This difficulty arises in part because older individuals often have limited involvement in the labour market, which means their health status and activity levels are less directly linked to measurable economic outputs like formal employment or labour productivity.

To address this issue and estimate the economic value of good health in older age groups, the European Observatory, the WHO Barcelona Office for Health Systems Financing, and the WHO Demographic Change and Healthy Ageing Unit developed the MOVE Simulator. This tool is based on the understanding that health status significantly influences how people use their time and that time has economic value, even for people who are not actively participating in the labour market. Individuals in good health may be more likely to engage in community activities, informal caregiving, and other non-market productive activities that, while often overlooked in national statistics, contribute significantly to societal welfare and economic stability. When older people enjoy better health, they are more likely to spend time participating in these sorts of activities, which can be assessed and quantified in monetary terms even if those activities are not actually compensated monetarily.

How to use the MOVE simulator?

The MOVE simulator allows a user to estimate the value of changes in health status for an individual or a population based on data from harmonized European time use surveys (HETUS). These surveys collect detailed information about how individuals spend their time, and that time can subsequently be valued in monetary terms.

For an individual, simply describe the characteristics of a fictitious person (e.g. age, sex, marital status, education, employment status, country of residence) and run the tool to compare their time spent on different non-market productive activities – and the monetary value of the time spent on many of those activities – if their health status were to change.

For the population, create a fictious population health intervention that targets a particular age group, define the size of the target population in a selected country, and then approximate the expected distribution of health before and after the intervention. Then run the tool to estimate the economic value generated by the health intervention due to changes in how people spend their time on non-market productive activities.

Hourly monetary values of non-market activities (i.e. wage levels) are illustrative and derived from United Kingdom Household Satellite Accounts adjusted to 2023 Euros; however, they can be edited by a user to explore different assumptions about relative wages on a country-by-country basis.

What non-market productive activities are considered?

Non-market productive activities include (1) housing (e.g. cleaning dwelling; disposal of waste); (2) transport (e.g. travel related to shopping); (3) nutrition (e.g. food preparation, shopping mainly for food); (4) clothing (i.e. handicraft and producing textiles); (5) laundry services (e.g. ironing); (6) childcare (e.g. physical care and supervision); (7) adult care (e.g. physical care and supervision of an adult household member); and (8) voluntary work (i.e. volunteer work through an organisation). We also include other non-monetized non-market productive activities such as personal care, using mass media, studying, or participating in sports.