Are healthy lives longer and equitably shared?

The ageing process that is unfolding across countries all over the world is an unprecedented landmark in human history: individuals worldwide can now expect to survive to ages that were deemed unattainable only a few decades ago. Less clear, though, is whether the retreat of mortality towards older ages has been accompanied by commensurate morbidity declines. In an ageing world, there are increasing concerns as to (i) whether the extra years of life are spent in ‘good’ or in ‘less-than-good’ health, and (ii) whether the healthy and unhealthy years of life are (un)equally distributed across individuals. In this talk, I plan to summarize some of the main ideas and findings of the HEALIN project, which aims at exploring the relationship between individuals’ health deterioration and death from a demographic perspective. While morbidity and mortality dynamics have been well-documented separately, the relationship between both phenomena is poorly understood – mostly because the strong data requirements needed to study them under the same conceptual framework.