Building an Asian Brain Economy Strategy Around Brain Capital

On 17 September 2026, the Euro-Mediterranean Economists Association (EMEA) and the Global Brain Economy Initiative (GBEI) convened the webinar “Developing an Asian Brain Economy Strategy.” Organized in the context of the World Economic Forum’s Brain Economy Action Forum, where the two organizations serve as Pathfinders, the online session drew support from Rice University, the University of Texas Medical Branch, the Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative and the Brain Capital Alliance.

Professor Rym Ayadi, founder and president of EMEA, presented the emerging Asian Brain Economy Index and moderated a discussion spanning national brain health strategies in China, Malaysia, Japan and India. Across the session, a recurring argument took shape: brain capital belongs at the center of economic policy, and Asia, despite strong progress on skills, is not yet protecting the brain health that underpins it.

Brains as infrastructure

Harris Eyre, executive director of GBEI, opened with the initiative’s founding claim.

“Brains are infrastructure. We believe the economy runs on brain capital, which involves two things: brain health and brain skills. But we don’t treat brains as infrastructure right now. We treat brains as costs.”

Those costs, he said, include poor health and healthcare, lost productivity and poor educational attainment, and they sit fragmented across systems. The alternative is to treat the brain as an asset with a return on investment, the same way economies once built roads, ports, railways, electricity and broadband. Eyre put the current burden at $3.5 trillion in healthcare costs and lost productivity, a figure that keeps rising on the status quo. Investing in the brain economy, by contrast, carries a large upside: scaling proven brain health interventions could generate up to $6.2 trillion in GDP by 2050, according to estimates from the World Economic Forum and the McKinsey Health Institute. Infrastructures, he added, have five enabling conditions: knowledge, capital, places to pilot, organizations to adopt, and public systems to scale.

Measuring brain capital: the Asian Brain Economy Index

Ayadi, a co-founder of the Brain Capital Alliance, framed the index she helped design. Brain capital is the combined value of brain health and brain skills, two dimensions that interact across the lifespan and respond to the surrounding “exposome”: the policies, institutions, environments, businesses and education and health systems that can either enable or disable it.

“Brain health and brain skills are productive assets. They are part of our economic infrastructure.”

The global Brain Capital Index, launched at Davos in January 2026, rests on three transparent pillars: enablers, which cover basic conditions from health and education to food safety and nutrition; brain health, which captures the burden of mental, neurological and other disorders; and brain skills, which measures learning, innovation, knowledge creation and the capacity to participate in a changing economy. Indicators draw on the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, the World Bank, the World Health Organization and UNESCO, and are normalized with equal weights. Ayadi stressed that the design favors transparency and replicability over opaque statistical weighting, and that the index is a benchmark and learning tool rather than a ranking.

At aggregate level, Asia performs above the global average, but that average is itself declining. The regional picture is mixed. Enablers have improved over the long term, yet their recent momentum has weakened. Brain health has also weakened, a finding she cautioned must be read carefully given differences in diagnosis, data availability and reporting. Brain skills show clear progress since 2010, though Asia remains below the global average on that pillar. Within the region, China fares highest across all three pillars.

China’s brain health initiative

Richard Zao Han, director of international affairs at the Shanghai Medical Innovation and Development Foundation, described a national initiative launched in 2022. Mental, neurological, substance use and self-harm conditions account for 20% of non-fatal disease burden in China, and stroke remains the leading cause of death among neurological disorders.

The initiative centers on brain cognitive function analysis, with the aim of understanding, repairing and stimulating the brain. Its work spans a public welfare fund for prevention, diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation; public awareness and free medical services to counter stigma; and a data system across specialties. A two-tier network of brain health centers is taking shape, with brain health centers providing primary-care-like early diagnosis and screening, and comprehensive centers handling more complex cases. Twenty cities have already joined the pilot, with a target of 100 this year. A parallel children’s brain health center development alliance and a dementia-focused alliance extend the model across the life course, with an emphasis on Alzheimer’s disease.

Zao Han pointed to a 2020 BMJ collaboration involving eight research teams and 42 international experts that reframed the scientific definition of brain health and identified six foundations and six pillars of action. The foundation has also signed a memorandum of understanding with EMEA to develop a China brain capital index in the coming months.

Malaysia’s demographic squeeze

Jafri Malin Abdullah, chairman of the Brain Behaviour Cluster, laid out Malaysia’s converging pressures. The country is aging rapidly and will become an “age society” with 18.3% of its population aged 65 and above by 2060. Declining birth rates are producing a regressive population pyramid: a shrinking working-age population supporting a growing older one.

The brain health burden compounds the demographic shift. Dementia affects 8.5% of older adults, with Alzheimer’s accounting for 60 to 70% of cases. Dyslexia affects 4 to 8% of school-age children, autism spectrum rates rose from 6.34 to 9.29 per 1,000, and one in four adolescents reports depressive symptoms. Among working-age adults, stroke causes 48,000 new cases and almost 20,000 deaths each year, one in four of them under the age of 50, while traumatic brain injury ranks among the top three causes of ICU admission. Parkinson’s cases are projected to rise from about 20,000 to 120,000 by 2040.

In April 2026, the Academy of Sciences Malaysia established a special interest group on the brain economy with a mandate to develop a national position paper. Its four objectives, organized across five pillars, run from a national life-course framework and strategic policy recommendations to coordinated data systems and integration of brain health into primary care and workplaces. Abdullah stressed that moving from a position paper to national impact needs four things: mandate, ownership, coordination and funding. He also tied the brain economy to Malaysia’s aggressive push on artificial intelligence, which includes AI Malaysia Bhd, launched on 28 July 2026 by Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, the National AI Action Plan 2026 to 2030, and a program offering free AI subscriptions to up to 100,000 young Malaysians aged 18 to 30 from 31 August 2026.

Japan: workplace mental health as an economic cost

Haruka Kokaze, chief of staff and senior lead for Japan mental health initiatives at One Mind, argued that Japan shows both why a brain economy strategy is urgent and how the private sector becomes its engine. As the world’s most aged major economy with a structurally shrinking workforce, Japan cannot grow by adding workers; growth has to come from the capacity of each one.

“Every worker’s cognitive capacity, resilience, and creativity, their brain capital, is a national economic asset.”

Nearly seven in ten Japanese employees report significant work-related stress, and only 6% feel engaged in their jobs, against a global average of 23%. Neglecting workplace mental health costs Japan an estimated 6 trillion yen each year, roughly 1% of GDP, once presenteeism is counted. The footprint extends beyond Japan: majority-owned Japanese affiliates in the United States employ nearly one million Americans and contribute over $174 billion to GDP, making Japan the country’s second-largest foreign employer.

Kokaze offered three levers that move the private sector. Policy signals make brain health visible, from mandatory stress checks since 2015 to the government’s health and productivity management certification, which turned workforce mental health into a comparable credential that shapes recruitment and investor perception. Measurement gives that visibility teeth: a mental health at work index built with Columbia University has been completed by 149 organizations representing 2.75 million workers across 25 industries and 23 countries, and organizations that pair strategy with measurement report 36% lower voluntary turnover. Coalitions give leaders a peer community, the logic behind One Mind’s workforce mental health coalition and its 2024 Tokyo symposium of more than 60 executives from over 55 companies.

Keeping human dignity in the brain economy

Sook Yee Tai, chairman of the NO.17 Foundation, part of Singapore’s Tsao Pao Chee group, offered the session’s most human-centered intervention.

“Brain capital is not produced in the brain alone. It is produced between people, in relationship.”

Workplace wellbeing, she argued, is not a benefit or a program but an economic strategy, because the workplace is where most adults spend most of their waking lives. The social contract that split wellbeing from production has quietly come apart, and business cannot wait for it to be rewritten. She urged leaders to move from “I” to “we”, to organize around role and relationship rather than responsibility alone, and to begin with leadership wellbeing.

“Fear produces compliance. Love produces commitment. Fear produces productivity. Love produces creativity.”

Asia, she said, holds a relational advantage in family businesses and long time horizons, but risks importing a brain economy model that treats the mind as one more resource to be optimized and extracted. Her closing ask had three parts: business should take up its part in the social contract place by place; the quality of relationships should be measured with the same seriousness as outputs; and the work should begin with the wellbeing of leadership.

Investment, policy and the question of scale

In discussion, Jeremy Kamo, head of business development at SecondMuse, extended Ayadi’s measurement point into finance.

“We can’t invest into what we can’t price.”

Mobilizing capital, he said, means first articulating the market and its investable opportunities, then curating demand through mechanisms like advanced market commitments and outcomes-based contracts, and finally coordinating capital across philanthropic, public and private actors into a single stack, the way physical infrastructure is financed. Rajinder K. Dhamija, director of the Institute of Human Behaviour and Allied Sciences in New Delhi, described India’s government-sponsored national task force on brain health, the only one of its kind, and a 12-district pilot covering all parts of the country. With 10.2% of Indians aged over 65, a share set to double within 15 years, and 9 million people living with dementia, he argued India is an ideal place to pilot the brain capital index at district, state and national levels. Pravin Thomas, convener of the India Brain Forum, proposed planning for adoption before a pilot begins, shared benefit agreements across sectors, and “cognitive stress testing” of workplace and AI systems before wide deployment. Favour Omileke, a program specialist at the Health and Global Policy Institute, closed the loop by urging the group to build on what already works in Asia, its collective and relational culture, and to act as good ancestors for the generations that follow.

Toward an Asian brain economy strategy

Ayadi closed with three messages. Brain capital should be treated as core economic infrastructure, because it connects health, skills, productivity, innovation, resilience and purpose, and moves the frame from growth to purpose. Regional comparability must be combined with national differentiation: an Asian brain economy index can provide a shared evidence base while countries follow different implementation plans, with bodies like ASEAN and APEC as the umbrella. And measurement is a tool for coordinated action, not the goal itself.