Kunz, Adrian (2024) Investigating differences in Healthy Life Expectancy (HLE) between migrants and natives in Germany using Multistate Lifetables. Master thesis.
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Abstract
A well-established demographic finding is that migrants tend to enjoy longer life expectancies (LE) than natives which is often referred to as the Migrant Mortality Advantage (MMA). However, it is also known that migrants tend to have a disadvantage in most health measures resulting in a shorter healthy life expectancy (HLE) than natives. This paradox has been confirmed in Belgium, the Netherlands, England and Wales, but all this research relies on the Sullivan method. This technique is not very data-demanding but can be biased if its assumptions are violated. To prevent these biases and investigate the causes of this paradox, I used multistate models. My research questions were to investigate to what extent LE and HLE at age 50 differ between migrants and natives, and how the different transitions between health statuses and death contribute to these differences. I used German data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to model and predict transition probabilities between good and bad self-reported health (SRH) and death by age, sex and migration status. These probabilities were used to apply multistate models and obtain HLE and LE by sex and migration status. Finally, I applied a decomposition method to estimate the contribution of each transition to the differences in (healthy) life expectancies between migrants and natives. My results confirm that migrants in Germany enjoy a higher LE than natives (men: +0.74 years, women: +0.79 years) but suffer from a shorter HLE (men: -2.28 years, women: -2.78 years). The decompositions show that migrants’ lower death probabilities, particularly for unhealthy people, explain migrants’ higher LE while migrants’ higher incidence and lower recovery probabilities mainly contribute to migrants’ shorter HLE. Migrants’ lower death probabilities cannot compensate for their disadvantage in HLE. This study supports previous research confirming migrants’ health disadvantages, but future studies should investigate the causes of migrants’ lower recovery and higher incidence probabilities such as specific diseases.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Master) |
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| Degree programme: | Population Studies |
| Supervisor: | Remund, A.P.P. |
| Date Deposited: | 19 Jul 2024 07:10 |
| Last Modified: | 19 Jul 2024 07:10 |
| URI: | https://frw.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/4636 |
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