Estimating the Socioeconomic Impact from Worksite Health Promoting Activities through a Quantitative Approach

Abstract: In recent years, Sweden has faced soaring numbers of sick leave reports and costs associated with sickness absence. This has highlighted the importance of worksite health promoting activities, based on the assumption that such would offset the recent trend shift in public health. Despite the large number of advocates of such programmes, previous literature has failed to draw consistent conclusions on the economic- and health outcomes of worksite health promotion activities. Lack of methodological quality has been pointed out as one of the main reasons to the ambiguous findings. In an attempt to circumvent the caveats associated with longitudinal studies on health promotion programmes, we develop a multi-period overlapping generations model with the purpose of providing an indication on the socioeconomic implications of worksite health promotion activities in the Swedish economy. We do this by implementing three different programmes, put in relation to existing design on the Swedish market. We find that the worksite health promotion programmes implementing mandatory exercise during working hours generate the most efficient outcomes from a socioeconomic perspective.