Health Status Transitions

This paper was prepared as Work Package IV of the AHEAD project – Ageing, Health Status and the Determinants of Health Expenditure – which has received financing from the European Commission under the 6th Research Framework Programme. The purpose of this work package was to build up a picture of the movements in health status of the elderly population of each country in the EU by age and sex. Residential care and death were considered as well as states of health. Due to the scarcity of data regarding residential care, however, we calculated transition probabilities between the different states of health only for Belgium, Germany and UK. In addition, we calculated healthy life expectancies for those three countries. The calculations/estimations were derived from various micro- and macro-data sources (e.g. ECHP), and build upon results of WP III. The Stone-algorithm was used as a means of calibration.