Measures for comparing the mortality history of cohorts

The commonly used period life expectancy comparisons between populations correspond to juxtapositions of current mortality levels.

To construct actual life expectancies as experienced by cohorts one needs complete historical series of mortality, which are only found in a subset of developed countries.

For example, Australia series of mortality in the Human-Mortality-Database only starts in 1921, which does not allow for any cohort life table to be constructed.

Two mortality measures are presented which include the mortality history of cohorts and which are not limited to countries with complete cohort mortality data:

(1) The temporary cohort life expectancy from birth to the age attained in the last observed year, or cohort xe0, is a well-known, but seldom used measure; and (2) The Truncated Cross-sectional Average Length of life (TCAL) is a novel measure that captures historical information of all the cohorts present at a given moment.

The value of TCAL depends on the rates used to complete the cohort series.

However, differences between TCALs of two populations remain very similar irrespective of the data used to complete the cohort series.

The two measures are illustrated by comparing the mortality of Australia with that of the US, Denmark, Japan and other high-longevity countries.

Specific cohorts that account for most of the disparity in mortality between the populations are identified.

Vladimir Canudas-Romo is a Mexican demographer, trained in Germany, the Netherlands and the United States.

He worked for ten years at institutions in the US (Penn State, UC Berkeley, and Johns Hopkins University) prior to 2013 when he joined the Max-Planck Odense Center on the Biodemography of Aging, Denmark, as Associate Professor.

Vladimir’s research interests are: mortality, longevity, and currently he is working on developing new models of mortality forecasting. Formal demography or the existent mathematical relations between demographic measures is also at the core of his interests and he continues developing new demographic measures that help explicate population phenomena.

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