Relationships between best-practice and greatest possible life expectancies
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ORIGINAL INVESTIGATION
Relationships between best‑practice and greatest possible life expectancies Filipe Costa de Souza1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract This paper investigated the relationships between the best-practice and the greatest possible life expectancies by means of gaps, lags and decomposition analyses, from 1950–1955 up to 2095–2100. The data were gathered from the United Nations’ World Population Prospects (2017), containing abridged period life tables, for both sexes combined, for 201 countries or areas, which allowed the identification of low-mortality regions that are sometimes omitted in previous studies. It was observed that both best-practice and greatest possible life expectancies rose and are expected to continue to rise linearly in a very similar way. Moreover, the average gap between the best-practice and the greatest possible life expectancies was of about 1.14 years and the average lag was 7.59 years. Finally, it was found that major contributions to the gap are typically due to age groups beyond 65 years. Keywords Life expectancy · Mortality · Longevity · Life span · Decomposition · Aging
Introduction Period life expectancy at birth (or simply life expectancy) is undoubtedly the most relevant and broadly used health indicator (Vaupel 2010; van Raalte et al. 2018). Its overall increasing tendency in the past decades is viewed as a major socioeconomic achievement to mankind (Ayuso et al. 2016), in such a way that high life expectancy levels are synonymous of human development (Mayhew and Smith 2015). Life expectancy is constantly associated with health behaviors (Barros et al. 2016), literacy, inequality and income (Kim and Kim 2018), politics (Verstraeten et al. 2016; Mackenbach 2013; Mackenbach et al. 2013), health infrastructure and human resources (Okamoto 2006; Huang et al. 2016) among other factors and the understanding of its trends impacts both individual and social planning (Oeppen and Vaupel 2002). Responsible editor: Susanne Iwarsson. * Filipe Costa de Souza [email protected] 1
Departamento de Ciências Contábeis e Atuariais, Centro de Ciências Sociais Aplicadas, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Cidade Universitária, Avenida dos Funcionários, S/N, Recife, PE CEP 50670‑901, Brazil
Moreover, the high levels of life expectancy already achieved in countries such as Japan (Tokudome et al. 2016), for example, and the increasing number of centenarians and super-centenarians stimulate discussions about the limits of human life span and the formulation of hypotheses about future trends in mortality (Barbi et al. 2018; Dong et al. 2016). One way to analyze trends in life expectancy and limits of human life span is by means of best-practice life expectancy, which indicates the highest life expectancy achieved, in a given calendar year, among national populations (Oeppen and Vaupel 2002; Shkolnikov et al. 2011). Oeppen and Vaupel showed that the increases in the female best-practice life expectancy follow a linear path, with a 2.5-year improvement per decade from 1840 u
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