Commentary: A long life means little if we’re too sick to enjoy it

To put it another way, a one-year healthspan gain could be worth 0.5 per cent to 0.7 per cent of Singapore’s GDP. That’s about the size of a mid-tier industry, achieved not by building factories or data centres, but by keeping people healthier for longer.

This economic framing matters because it changes how we think about ageing.

Too often, ageing is treated as a fiscal burden. But if the focus shifts from simply adding years to life toward adding healthy ones, the story changes. Healthspan becomes the foundation of what scholars call the “longevity dividend”, the trillions in economic value that could be realised if we slow down the onset of chronic disease and extend healthy years across the population.

In the United States, modelling studies show that even a modest 2.2-year delay in ageing could generate US$7 trillion in savings over 50 years. Scale that logic to Asia, with its massive and fast-ageing populations, and the dividend could match up with the productivity booms of past technological revolutions.