Working longer despite poorer health? Inequalities in working and health expectancies at older ages in South Korea

Abstract

Alongside increasing life expectancy comes the opportunity to extend working life, but whether those extra years are spent with or without multimorbidity is unclear. Existing studies estimated healthy and unhealthy working life expectancy (WLE), defined using binary health indicators, until retirement age and used data from Western countries. However, countries with the greatest burden of population aging are in the Asia-Pacific region. Using data from eight waves of the Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging (2006-2020) and a discrete-time multistate modelling approach, we estimate WLE at age 55 with no disease, one disease, and multimorbidity and explore intersectional inequalities by sex, education, and urban/rural residence. Males, the low educated, and rural dwellers have higher WLE compared to females, the high educated, and urban dwellers. Regardless of sex, individuals with low education and from rural areas both have higher WLE with multimorbidity than their high educated and urban counterparts. These findings highlight that older adults with low education and from rural areas are most in need of additional support to help balance work and health responsibilities. This is contrary to observations from Western countries and underscores the need to better understand how patterns in work and multimorbidity vary across different contexts.