Healthy Life Expectancy in China: Modeling and Implications for Public and Private Insurance

Abstract

Already home to 23% of the global elderly population, China will experience further demographic change in the coming decades. To address the consequences of population ageing, the Chinese government is implementing major social insurance reforms and promotes the development of private insurance markets. We aim to inform these initiatives by developing a new method to project healthy life expectancy in different regions. Healthy life expectancy is an important population health measure which is increasingly used in the actuarial literature. Our new approach relies on publicly available data from the Global Burden of Disease Study for life expectancy and healthy life expectancy for 139 countries. We use the model to estimate healthy life expectancy at birth in 2015 for 31 province-level regions in China for both males and females. We discuss the implications of our results for planned increases in the retirement age in China and for long-term care insurance pricing.