Incidence-based Estimates of Healthy Life Expectancy for the United Kingdom: Coherence between Transition Probabilities and Aggregate Life Tables

Will the United Kingdom’s ageing population be fit and independent, or suffer from greater chronic ill health? Healthy life expectancy is commonly used to assess this: it is an estimate of how many years are lived in good health over the lifespan. This paper examines a means of generating estimates of healthy and unhealthy life expectancy consistent with exogenous population mortality data. The method takes population transition matrices and adjusts these in a statistically coherent way so as to render them consistent with aggregate life tables. It is applied to estimates of healthy life expectancy for the United Kingdom.