Recent scientific advances have established beyond reasonable doubt that childhood programmes can have important effects on health and wellbeing many decades in the future, during working years and retirement (Conti et al., 2019; Heckman, 2012). Policy makers want quantitative information about these long-term effects, and they also want information about distributional impacts on inequality in lifetime health and wellbeing, as well as inequality in current period health and wellbeing. While childhood policy analysis using randomised control trials and quasi-experiments is the gold standard in establishing cause and effect relationships, this is rarely possible when quantifying lifetime policy effects over many decades. Even when long-term follow-up data is available, such analysis yields insights about historical cohorts born many decades ago with questionable relevance to the current childhood policy context. Microsimulation offers a forward-looking alternative for childhood policy analysis, as it can extrapolate long-term outcomes for cohorts living in the present and project the effects of the policies that policymakers are considering today.

Recent scientific advances have established beyond reasonable doubt that childhood programmes can have important effects on health and wellbeing many decades in the future, during working years and retirement (Conti et al., 2019; Heckman, 2012). Policy makers want quantitative information about these long-term effects, and they also want information about distributional impacts on inequality in lifetime health and wellbeing, as well as inequality in current period health and wellbeing. While childhood policy analysis using randomised control trials and quasi-experiments is the gold standard in establishing cause and effect relationships, this is rarely possible when quantifying lifetime policy effects over many decades. Even when long-term follow-up data is available, such analysis yields insights about historical cohorts born many decades ago with questionable relevance to the current childhood policy context. Microsimulation offers a forward-looking alternative for childhood policy analysis, as it can extrapolate long-term outcomes for cohorts living in the present and project the effects of the policies that policymakers are considering today.