Healthy life expectancy in Hong Kong special administrative region of China

Sullivan's method and a regression model were used to calculate healthy life expectancy (HALE) for men and women in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (Hong Kong SAR) of China. These methods need estimates of the prevalence and information on disability distributions of 109 diseases and HALE for 191 countries by age, sex and region of the world from the WHO's health assessment of 2000. The population of Hong Kong SAR has one of the highest healthy life expectancies in the world. Sullivan's method gives higher estimates than the classic linear regression method. Although Sullivan's method accurately calculates the influence of disease prevalence within small areas and regions, the regression method can approximate HALE for all economies for which information on life expectancy is available. This paper identifies some problems of the two methods and discusses the accuracy of estimates of HALE that rely on data from the WHO assessment.