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Life Expectancy and Healthy Life Expectancy of Migrant and Native-born Population in Australia, 2006–2016

Guogui HUANG, Macquarie University
Fei Guo, Department of Management, Macquarie University, Australia

Even though migrant health is increasingly recognised as a core issue of global public health, the health differences between migrants and the natives and their age variations are still inadequately understood. To fill this gap, this study provides the first examination of migrants’ life expectancy (LE) and healthy life expectancy (HLE) in the context of Australia. Results show that compared with the Australian-born population, the overseas-born population enjoys longer LE at all ages; however, while the migrant population has higher HLE at younger ages, they suffer lower HLE in later life. Additionally, as age increases, HLE and the ratio of HLE/LE of the overseas-born population decline faster than they do in the Australian-born population and faster among female migrants than they do in male migrants. Results also indicate that the overseas-born population, despite experiencing prolonged LE during the period 2006–2016, suffered stagnated HLE and decreased ratio of HLE/LE over the same period. Results imply different patterns of the ‘healthy migrant effect’ in mortality and morbidity and significant variation by age in the effects of acculturation on migrants’ health outcomes. Policy implications of these findings, including greater emphasis on improving migrants’ quality of life, are discussed.

Keywords: Health and morbidity, Mortality, Migrant populations, Population ageing

See paper.

  Presented in Session 140. Profiles and Patterns of Chronic Multimorbidity