Editorial

A special issue of Health Economics on “Disparate Ageing” (Volume 30, Issue S1), edited by Vincenzo Atella (University of Rome “Tor Vergata”) and Dana Goldman (University of Southern California), hosts an interesting selection of articles using microsimulation methods to investigate the role of education in health outcomes. This highlights the increasing use of microsimulations in public health, which we also witness in this journal (and this issue). From the Editorial (Atella et al., 2021):

To obtain precise forecasts of the levels of health care spending and to establish adequate policy responses, it is paramount to have tools that allow estimating future health care expenditure and costs. Since “the complexity of the systems and multiplicity of factors affecting both total and public spending make this a highly complicated task, where results will always be surrounded by considerable uncertainties [...], fulfilling this task requires sophisticated and complex modeling methods that take into account the evolution of health, economic and demographic variables at individual and cohort levels. Microsimulation models (MSMs) have emerged as a useful tool to answer these questions [...].