The impact of the health-care sector on national economies in selected European countries.

Policy-makers face pressures to improve lives and safeguard public finances sustainably. In this analysis, we estimate the economic importance of the health-care sector in 19 European national economies. We use input-output tables for the year 2010 and sectoral data to estimate a set of multipliers: simple, total, truncated, type I and type II multipliers for output, income, value-added, employment and import multiplier. The analysis reveals similarities in the economic importance of the health-care sector for the national economies of the observed countries. Results suggest prevailing positive effects on national economies (value-added, employment and household income) when spending on health-care sector products and services increases, especially in comparison to the effects of increases in spending in other sectors. The importance of the health-care sector is connected to countries' levels of development; the benefits are especially promising in countries with lower levels of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, where changes in the health-care sector have a larger impact on employment in the national economy than similar changes in more developed countries. The health-care sector therefore can play an important role as an instrument of economic policy.