finally this paper stresses the importance of these findings for the economy at large and supports the use of carefully designed chronic disease prevention strategies targeting people at higher risk of adverse labour market outcomes which may lead to substantial gains in economic production through a healthier and more productive workforce an assessment of the labour market outcomes of chronic diseases should rely primarily on analyses of longitudinal datasets based on statistical approaches that permit to gauge the causal impact of chronic diseases and their risk factors the findings presented in this paper also support the claim that policies for the prevention of chronic diseases and their risk factors have important social outcomes in addition to health benefits which should be accounted for in evaluations of the impacts of such policies