Top and Bottom Longevity of Nations
2023
Similar to the study of the distribution of income within countries, population-level health disparities can be examined by analyzing the distribution of age at death.
This article exposes a characterization of the age-at-death distribution across populations with a focus on the lower and upper tails of the distribution. These metrics, specifically the gap measures in age and share across the 10th and 90th percentiles of the distribution, enable a systematic comparison of national performances, which yields information supplementary to the cross-country differences commonly identified by traditionally-used indicators of life expectancy and coefficient of variation. Examining the tails of age-at-death distributions can help characterize the comparative situations of the better- and worse-off individuals across nations, similar to depictions of income distributions in economics.
Top and Bottom Longevity of Nations
Source:
Verguet S, Niwa M, Bolongaita S. Top and Bottom Longevity of Nations: A Retrospective Analysis of the Age-at-Death Distribution across 18 OECD Countries. European Journal of Public Health 2023; 33 (1): 114-120. https://doi.org/10.1093/eurpub/ckac134