Definition: healthy life expectancy measures the number of years a person of a given age can expect to live without serious or moderate health problems. It is calculated on the basis of life expectancy and surveys assessing the share of people who consider themselves in good or poor health and is expressed in years. The data presented here are drawn from mortality statistics and from data on perceived health collected from the Statistics on Income and Living Conditions survey (EU-SILC). Statistics Belgium organises this EU-harmonised survey in Belgium and makes the results available, in particular to Eurostat. The data used here come from Eurostat, which publishes detailed and comparable results between EU Member States. Since these data are based on surveys, a margin of uncertainty must be taken into account. The confidence intervals for these data are available on request from Statistics Belgium.

Goal: healthy life expectancy must increase.

The Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs adopted by the UN in 2015 include goal 3: “Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.”

The Federal Long-Term Strategic Vision for Sustainable Development includes objective 4: "Healthy life expectancy will have increased compared to 2010. The gap in healthy life expectancy by education level and gender will be reduced by 50% on average” (Belgian Official Gazette, 08/10/2013).

International comparison: the healthy life expectancy in the European Union (EU27) is quite stable between 2005 and 2014, on average 61.3 years. Subsequently, there is an increase to 64.6 years in 2019. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the indicator decreases to 64.0 years in 2020 and 63.6 years in 2021. When Member States are divided into three groups, Belgium is part of the group with average performance and outperforms the European average in 2021. In that year, Malta ranked first with 68.7 years and Latvia last with 53.8 years.

UN indicator: the selected indicator does not correspond to any monitoring indicator for the SDGs but is related to goal 3 since it measures the population health status.

Sources

• General

  • SDGs, Sustainable Development Goals: United Nations (2015), Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 25 September 2015, document A/RES/70/1.

  • Indicators: United Nations (2017), Work of the Statistical Commission pertaining to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 6 July 2017, document A/RES/71/313.

  • UN Sustainable Development: https://sdgs.un.org/ (consulted on 18/01/2023).

  • UN Sustainable Development Goal indicators website: https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/ (consulted on 18/01/2023).

• Specific

  • Belgian Official Gazette: http://www.ejustice.just.fgov.be/cgi/welcome.pl; research on http://www.ejustice.just.fgov.be/doc/rech_f.htm (consulted on 24/09/2020).

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