Regional Disparities in Life Expectancy in the Netherlands and the Role of Internal Migration

ABSTRACT Whereas longevity differences between movers and stayers are well‐known, the impact of migration on regional disparities in longevity remains understudied. We estimated the contribution of internal migration to regional life expectancy levels and disparities across the Netherlands, thereby assessing the importance of different age groups. We used mortality and demographic data by internal migrant status, COROP (NUTS‐3) region, age and sex from the Dutch population register, including the native population aged 10+ in 2015–2019. We compared regional disparities in life expectancy at age 10 (e10) for the observed population and hypothetical ‘no‐migration’ population using each individual's place of residence 10 years earlier. We also applied age‐decomposition methods. The range in e10 across the 40 COROP regions was 2.22 years for males and 2.54 years for females. Artificially putting movers back into their region of origin yielded differences in regional e10 of between −0.2 to 0.3 years for males and −0.5 to 0.3 years for females, and – on average – 1.65% (males) and 4.17% (females) reduced regional disparities in population‐weighted standard deviation of e10. The age groups that contributed most to the difference in regional disparities in e10 between the observed and the hypothetical situation were 65+ and 10–29 for males, and 30–64 and 65+ for females. The small impact of internal migration on regional disparities in e10 is likely due to the low proportion of movers. Causal effects (socioeconomic composition, health behaviour prevalence) appear more important in determining regional life expectancy disparities in the Netherlands than selection effects.