Job type linked to healthy working years in older Chinese adults
Estimated healthy working years from age 50 were 16.06 for women in agriculture, versus 20.78 for self-employed women or those in family businesses.
Limit: Women remaining self-employed may already be healthier, inflating their apparent advantage
An observational study analyzed 11,626 Chinese adults aged 50–100, using four waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study between 2011 and 2018. Researchers combined survey data on health and current work with United Nations life tables to estimate years spent in different health and work states from age 50.
Women in agricultural work had the lowest estimated years of healthy work, at 16.06 years, and the highest years of unhealthy work, at 7.65 years. Self-employed women or those in family businesses had the highest healthy-work estimate, at 20.78 years, and the lowest unhealthy-work estimate, at 3.22 years. Among men, estimated healthy working years ranged from 17.12 for employees or other workers to 18.91 for agricultural workers.
Why it matters
The authors argued that retirement-age reform should account for the burden of working while unhealthy in older adulthood, particularly among women in agriculture, rather than relying on average longevity alone.
Caveats
These estimates came from survey patterns and life tables, not observation of complete remaining working lives, and the associations do not establish cause and effect. The report is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed.
From the paper
- Result
Agricultural men also had the highest unhealthy-working expectancy, at 4.00 years (95% CI: 3.75, 4.28), followed by self-employed or family-business men at 3.79 years (95% CI: 2.43, 5.24).
Results, Life expectancy at age 50 and decomposition into joint states
- Limitation
It does not estimate individual transitions between health-work states or model the causal effects of retirement on subsequent health.
Quoted word for word from the full text on researchsquare.com.
The paper
Zhengzhou University
Research Square, Oct 19, 2026, Open access, Preprint, not peer-reviewed
