Health Promotion International, Vol. 17, No. 3, 287-290,
September 2002
© Oxford University Press 2002
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How long do Swedish-speaking Finns live? A comment on the paper by Hyyppä and Mäki*
Address for correspondence: Fjalar Finnäs Social Science Research Unit Åbo Akademi University Vörågatan 9 65 100 Vasa Finland E-mail: ffinnas@abo.fi
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In a recent paper, Hyyppä and Mäki demonstrate and discuss interesting differences in health expectancy and mortality between the two language groups in Finland (Hyyppä and Mäki, 2001
). According to their results, the Swedish-speaking males lived 8.7 years longer than the Finnish-speaking men in the same region on the west coast of the country (Ostrobothnia). Their conclusion is that these differences are to a great extent due to differences in the extent of social capital. They state that the ‘differences are astonishingly large to appear in a highly monocultural and egalitarian society’. They also argue that the lifetime of the Swedish-speaking population is one of the longest in the world.
Apparently the latter conclusion is based on a comparison of their measure of average age at death in 1991–1996 for the Swedish speakers with the traditional life expectancy calculated for most populations. In 1996, the average age at death