WIC Hybrid Colloquium
Health expectancy: increasingly used, but poorly understood
Marc Luy – Director of the Vienna Institute of Demography of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and Honorary Professor of Demography at the University of Vienna
Wednesday, 26 February 2025 4:00 – 5:00 pm (CET)
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Health Expectancy (HE) indicators become increasingly important for health policies and public health measures. The general understanding of HE is that it simply extends the average life expectancy (LE) by one dimension. Technically, this is correct because the years lived by the life table population—the basis of LE—is divided into two quality dimensions: life years spent in good health and those spent in poor health. However, incorporating this additional dimension to the life table makes the HE indicators highly sensitive to various measurement and estimation issues. Their impact on levels and trends in HE can be huge, but is largely ignored in practical application. The talk presents selected examples from the research of the ERC project LETHE that demonstrate the HE sensitivity and discusses the usefulness of the indicator as well as possible ways to reduce its weaknesses.