The recent evolution of mortality patterns over age across Europe

Filipe Ribeiro, Universidade de Évora
Maria Mendes, Universidade de Évora

Successive improvements in human health resulted in a linear increase in the record life expectancy (Oeppen and Vaupel, 2002). In 1990, Horiuchi and Coale proposed a mortality measure with the intention to give a step ahead in the age pattern analysis of death rates and that is different from the conventional way (plotting the logarithm of the death rate against age) to examine age variations in mortality. The measure itself can be called the age-specific rate of mortality change with age, or in an easiest way, the life-table aging rate (LAR) like Carey and Liedo in 1995, Horiuchi and Wilmoth in 1997 and 1998 designated it. An empirical overview across years and different European countries will give a better understanding about the evolution of mortality over age and over time. This overview, besides the presentation of recent mortality behaviours, will also distinguish between the LAR itself and the Rate of Aging. So, within this paper, an empirical confrontation between LAR and Rate of Aging is drawn, mainly applying the LAR methodology and some models to estimate the force of mortality to different European countries and causes of death. With these methodologies is expected to find differences between the used measures as well as a shift in the highest value of mortality obtained with LAR to older ages over time. On the other hand, the pace of increase in mortality with age is expected to be different for the different countries, causes of death and sexes.