Self-assessed health among older people in Europe and internet use

About ten years ago, an age-related digital divide was identified, where 'the elderly' denoted a group of people at risk of losing the benefits of a digital society. The aims of this work are to find a relationship between self-assessed health and internet use by older people in European countries and to ascertain whether this relationship differs in countries with a more developed eHealth policy.

An ordered logistic regression is estimated for all countries in the sample and for two countries subsets which differ in their eHealth performance. Individual data is collected by SHARE. The classifying criterion of eHealth performance is based on the 'eHealth' policy dimension of the indicator used to construct the Digital Economy and Society Index. The average marginal effects are computed for the variable of internet use.

Results show that older people who use the internet tend to report better health status. This relationship however may not hold for low levels of health and it is stronger in countries with low eHealth performance.

Policy measures on eHealth not only contribute to people's health but also help to alleviate critical situations such as the one created by the Covid-19 pandemic.