Healthy and Unhealthy Working Life Expectancy across Emerging Welfare States: How Micro- and Macro-Level Factors Shape Who Works Longer in Poorer Health

Anastasia Lam , Humboldt University of Berlin, Einstein Center Population Diversity

Population aging and longer working lives makes it crucial to understand the relationship between health and employment across various contexts. These issues are particularly relevant for emerging welfare states that are balancing expanding social protection systems with high informal employment. Additionally, they sit at the nexus of demographic and health transitions, managing old-age employment amidst rising chronic disease burden and limited social protection. Healthy and unhealthy working life expectancy are valuable indicators for assessing the work-health relationship, especially within and between populations. Therefore, using a discrete-time multistate modelling approach, this study examines how micro- and macro-level factors shape healthy and unhealthy working life expectancy at age 50 across these emerging welfare states: China, Costa Rica, Mexico, South Africa, and South Korea. Expectancies are estimated by gender, education, place of residence, marital status, public pension receipt, and private health insurance coverage. Preliminary analyses based on nine waves (2006–2022) of the Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging show that men and women spend 26% and 14% of their remaining life expectancy working in poor health, respectively. Differences are more pronounced by urban/rural residence and private health insurance coverage. Individuals from rural areas and with private health coverage work longer in poorer health than those from urban areas and without private health coverage. These findings suggest that micro- and macro-level factors jointly structure late-life work and health. Future analysis will examine the other countries and compare how healthy and unhealthy working life expectancies differ and which factors may have larger influences.

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 Presented in Session P5. Health, Mortality, and Ageing 1