Dynamics of Health Expectancy: An Introduction to Multiple Multistate Method

Many studies have examined individual measures of health expectancy such as disability and morbidity among older populations. However, very few included multiple dimensions of health when calculating health expectancy. Since health is a multifaceted construct, it is valuable to explore different facets of health as time-varying variables. The typical method to do this is to include multiple dimensions into the state space. Yet, adding dimensions of health leads to a multiplicative increase in the number of states in the state space and having more than two time-varying variables is practically impossible with sample survey data. This paper proposes a Multiple Multistate Method that situates the multistate model within the broader family of Vector Autoregression models. This approach allows inclusion of time-varying covariates when estimating health expectancy. We also demonstrate the MMM in two empirical applications, showing the flexibility of the approach to explore health expectancies with complex state-spaces.

National Population Growth Rate, its Components, and Subnational Contributions

A population’s current growth rate is the average of age-specific growth rates, which represent the combined result of historical changes in fertility, mortality and migration. Applying the variable-r method, to get the historical contributions requires over 100 years of historical data. We propose an adapted version of the variable-r model to measure contributions for countries with shorter demographic series. Additionally, we extend this model to explore the contribution of subnational changes in national growth rate. Our results show that the age-specific contributions to the growth rate obtained from short historical series closely match those of the longer series. The contribution to national population growth is heavily weighted by the population sizes of the regions, although, Japanese population is declining while the three most populous prefectures have increased. Among the components of growth, survival shows the only uniform trend across all countries and subnational populations of consistent improvements in survival.

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