Rethinking economic growth: valuing breastfeeding and unpaid care in national statistics

Emerging research highlights the economic significance of breastfeeding and unpaid care work, urging governments to incorporate these vital contributions into national assessments to better address inequality, human capital, and child wellbeing.

Economists and policymakers tend to rely on gross domestic product, tax records and income surveys when they judge whether an economy is growing fairly. But a growing body of research suggests that one of the most important forms of investment in the next generation remains largely absent from those measures: breastfeeding and the unpaid care work that makes it possible. An article on Austaxpolicy argues that this omission leaves a serious gap in how governments think about inequality, human capital and child welfare. It says infants and young children are among the least visible groups in official economic statistics, even though they represent the future workforce and consumer base. The argument is not simply symbolic. If commercial infant formula is counted in national production while human milk is not, then a shift away from breastfeeding can make the economy look larger without necessarily improving children’s well-being.

The wider economic case for paying attention to breastfeeding is not new. The US Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service has estimated that raising breastfeeding rates to recommended levels could save at least $3.6 billion a year in the United States alone through lower treatment costs for childhood illnesses. A separate USDA analysis of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children found that higher breastfeeding rates would affect programme participation, reduce costs to WIC and Medicaid, and cut health-related spending for families and insurers. Academic reviews have also argued that human milk should be treated as an economically meaningful resource rather than an invisible one, because it carries both public health and financial value.

The Austaxpolicy article, drawing on a paper presented at the 2026 General Conference of the International Association for Research on Income and Wealth, says the issue reaches beyond health policy. It argues that breastfeeding can function as a natural buffer against poverty, especially because access to it has historically been more evenly spread than access to paid services. That matters for inequality measurement. Standard income and wealth statistics say little about whether infants are receiving the nutrition and care that shape later outcomes. By contrast, the paper says that surveys such as Demographic and Health Surveys and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys already contain the ingredients needed to estimate differences in breastfeeding access across income and wealth groups, creating a basis for distributional accounts that include children.

The research also points to ways statistical agencies could begin making this work practical. It cites the Mothers’ Milk Tool, developed by researchers at the Australian National University and international partners, which estimates the volume of human milk produced from breastfeeding prevalence data and covers about 140 countries. The Austaxpolicy piece says the tool suggests breastfeeding mothers worldwide produce roughly 35.6 billion litres of human milk each year, compared with potential output of more than 57 billion litres under optimal conditions. It also notes that in Nepal the implied value of human milk can be as much as half of GDP, underlining how large this hidden contribution can be. In Norway, meanwhile, human milk already appears as a separate category in national food surveillance statistics, offering a model for broader distributional accounting.

Taken together, the argument is that governments cannot make sound decisions about growth, equity and public spending if they leave care labour out of the frame. A review in Oxford Review of Economic Policy traced the long history of breastfeeding alongside changing public health and economic conditions, reinforcing the idea that infant feeding is not a private matter alone but part of a wider social and economic system. Another review published in 2025 concluded that evidence on the economic value of breastfeeding can inform financing, health system planning and public policy across countries at different income levels. The broader message from the Austaxpolicy article is that the beyond-GDP agenda will remain incomplete unless it includes children’s health, the unpaid work that supports it and the unequal conditions that determine who benefits.