Economic evaluation of patient level health care interventions (e.g. pharmaceuticals, diagnostic tests) is now widely used globally to inform decisions about which interventions should be provided by health care systems. However, far less attention has been paid to the economic evaluation of more complex population and system-level health care policies and interventions. These are making calls on the same resources as the patient level interventions and it is important that decision makers are able to consider the value-for-money of allocating resources to these population-and system-level interventions as well.

This paper begins by considering what is relevant economic evidence for informing decision making, highlighting the relevant outcomes of interest for the decision makers involved, what will be the impact of the intervention being considered on those outcomes and also the importance of considering the opportunity cost (what those same resources would achieve if used for other purposes) to establish their 'value-for-money'.

A review of the literature will then be conducted to establish what are the effects, consequences and characteristics of population-and system-level policies and interventions which make them challenging to establish their 'value-for-money'. Our review will consider both methods and applied papers to identify these issues, and we will then develop a taxonomy of these effects, consequences and characteristics. Following the development of the taxonomy, the paper will then consider what are the analytical methods available to address these issues so that the value-for-money of population-and system-level policies can be established.