Direct Healthy Life Expectancy Estimates from Life Tables with a Sullivan Extension. Bridging the Gap Between HALE and Eurostat Estimates

TL;DR

This paper introduces an extended life table model and a computer program to estimate healthy life expectancy, bridging the gap between WHO's HALE and Eurostat estimates with practical applications across countries.

Contribution

It presents a novel extension of classical life tables and a program to accurately estimate healthy life expectancy, integrating different estimation methods.

Findings

The program produces results similar to WHO's HALE estimates.

It provides estimates of healthy life expectancy at each age for multiple countries.

The methodology bridges the gap between WHO and Eurostat healthy life expectancy data.

Abstract

The analytic derivation of a more general model of survival-mortality and the estimation of a parameter bx related to the Healthy Life Years Lost (HLYL) is followed with the formulation of a computer program providing results similar to those of the World Health Organization for the Healthy Life Expectancy (HALE) and the corresponding HLYL estimates. This program is an extension of the classical life table including more columns to estimate the cumulative mortality, the average mortality, the person life years lost and finally the HLYL parameter bx. Evenmore, a further extension of the Excel program based on the Sullivan method provides estimates of the Healthy Life Expectancy at every year of the lifespan for five different types of estimates that are the Direct, WHO, Eurostat, Equal and Other. Estimates for several countries are presented. It is also presented a methodology and a program to bridge the gap between the World Health Organization (HALE) and Eurostat (HLE) healthy life expectancy estimates. The latest version of this program (SKI-6) appear in the Demographics2020 website.