Thirty Year Projected Magnitude (to 2050) of Near and Distance Vision Impairment and the Economic Impact if Existing Solutions are Implemented Globally

ABSTRACT

Purpose: Recent global, regional and country-level prevalence estimates for blindness and vision impairment will be important when designing future public health policies. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this discussion by estimating the productivity impact of known effective interventions to treat all preventable cases of vision impairment at the global, regional and country-level up to 2050. We also provide estimates of potential reduction in the number of people with vision impairment, as well as averted vision-impaired years up to 2050.

Methods: We combined recent estimates of the prevalence of blindness, distance and near vision impairment with the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (WDI) and estimated the global, regional and country-level productivity gains up to 2030, 2040 and 2050 from known effective interventions, primarily cataract surgery and treated uncorrected refractive errors. The magnitude of productivity gains relative to baseline depended on population size, estimated current and future prevalence of vision impairment, level of economic development, long-term wage growth, and long-term real interest rates.

Results: Globally, we estimate that the number of people affected by blindness could be reduced from the estimated 114.6 million by 2050 to 58.3 million. This would be associated with over one billion blind life-years averted and US$ 984 billion in global productivity gains. These numbers are dwarfed by the impact of interventions to reduce the prevalence of Moderate and Severe Vision Impairment (MSVI) [Presenting Acuity <20/60 to 20/400 in the better-seeing eye]. We estimate that the number of people affected by MSVI could be reduced by 435.8 million people to 147.9 million by 2050. This reduction would translate to over 9 billion MSVI -life-years avoided and US$ 17 trillion in productivity gains by 2050. While other causes of VI would not be possible to eliminate completely based on current known effective treatments, low-cost interventions to eliminate VI from uncorrected presbyopia would avert 1.2 billion presbyopia life-years and achieve US$ 1.05 trillion in productivity gains by 2050. In total, the global productivity gains for all three categories are estimated to be US$ 19 trillion by 2050. East Asia makes up the greatest share of productivity gains due to the high number of people affected by VI and the region’s continuing economic growth.

Conclusion: Implementation of currently known and effective treatments of avoidable blindness, MSVI and presbyopia would be expected to contribute significant productivity gains to the global economy at a fraction of the estimated costs to deliver them.

KEYWORDS:

• Productivity
• vision impairment
• blindness
• presbyopia