Across the Gulf, ambition and transformation is visible everywhere. Governments are diversifying their economies, investing in infrastructure and technology, strengthening human capital and building new industries designed to support growth for decades to come.
But there is another investment that will increasingly determine whether that growth is sustainable: health.
The Gulf’s economic ambitions depend on people being able to participate fully in the societies and economies being built around them. That makes population health more than a social outcome. It is part of the region’s economic infrastructure.
This matters because the burden of non-communicable diseases is rising at the same time as countries are asking more of their workforces and health systems. Across the Middle East, non-communicable diseases account for approximately 74 percent of deaths, with cardiovascular disease and diabetes among the major contributors.
A UNDP 2024 report, covering Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, estimated that NCDs cost these economies around $50 billion each year, equivalent to an average of 3.3 percent of their 2019 GDP. Around $30 billion comes from direct medical costs, while a further $20 billion is linked to productivity losses.
The price of chronic disease is not confined to the health budget. It appears when people leave the workforce earlier, lose productive working time or become less independent; when family members step away from work to provide care; and when preventable complications require increasingly intensive healthcare resources.
This is particularly important as Gulf economies place human capital at the center of their transformation agendas.
Diabetes illustrates the challenge. Around 38 percent of people living with diabetes in the region remain undiagnosed, increasing the likelihood that complications will only be identified after they have progressed. The economic impact of diabetes across the region is projected to reach as much as $1.5 trillion annually by 2050.
Diabetes-related complications, such as vision loss, makes those economic consequences tangible. In Saudi Arabia, the annual burden of diabetes-related visual impairment and blindness has been estimated at approximately SR150.3 billion ($40.08 billion), reflecting healthcare expenditure alongside productivity losses.
But these figures also point to an opportunity.
Evidence from the five GCC countries shows that implementing a package of WHO-recommended, highly cost-effective interventions to address NCDs would require approximately $14 billion over 15 years — equivalent to an average increase of around 1.4 percent in total health expenditure, or $16 per person annually.
Fully implementing these interventions could avert around 290,000 premature deaths over 15 years and generate approximately $49 billion in labor productivity gains.
This changes the economic conversation. The question is no longer simply how governments can contain rising healthcare expenditure, but where investment today can prevent significantly greater human and economic costs tomorrow.
That starts with prevention, awareness, systematic screening and earlier diagnosis. It also requires making better use of innovation. Artificial intelligence and digital tools can expand screening capacity, identify at-risk populations earlier and help health systems optimize specialist capacity. Their value, however, depends on being integrated into connected care pathways that take patients efficiently from identification to appropriate care.
Real-world evidence, national registries and stronger outcome measurement can reveal where patients are being diagnosed too late, where they are being lost along the care pathway and where investment can generate the greatest value.
The Gulf already has many of the foundations required: ambitious national visions, sophisticated digital infrastructure, investment capacity and an appetite for transformation.
As future budgets and development priorities take shape, health deserves to be considered through the same long-term investment lens applied to infrastructure, technology, and human capital.
The region’s next chapter of growth will depend not only on what it builds, but on how effectively it protects the health and productivity of the people who will drive it.
The writer is area head, Middle East at Roche Pharmaceuticals.