Health and life satisfaction factors of Portuguese older adults

Abstract

Portugal has some peculiar features concerning older age. Despite long life expectancy, the share of healthy life years in older ages is small. The decreasing relationship between age and life satisfaction in Portugal has recently been pointed out. The absence of knowledge about self-assessed health and life satisfaction of the population of older Portuguese motivates this analysis. This work aims to find the drivers of self-assessed health and life satisfaction and their relationship for older Portuguese (older than 70). Two ordered logistic regressions are estimated using data from the National Health Survey of 2019. Endogeneity of self-assessed health is tested in the regression of life satisfaction. The main descriptive result shows that older people in Portugal tend to report a low health status but a high level of life satisfaction. We also found that despite the general decrease across age and after controlling for determinants, life satisfaction seems to display a U-shape, and the likelihood of being life satisfied increases with age from the age group of 70–74 on. The main determinants of self-assessed health and life satisfaction include the existence of chronic diseases, physical limitations in daily life, and depression indicators. But the findings also show that social interactions and income play a part in the way people report health and life satisfaction. Some policy measures could be taken to jointly improve the health and life satisfaction.