Rise, stagnation, and rise of Danish women's life expectancy.
Abstract
Health conditions change from year to year, with a general tendency in many countries
for improvement. These conditions also change from one birth cohort to another: some
generations suffer more adverse events in childhood, smoke more heavily, eat poorer
diets, etc., than generations born earlier or later. Because it is difficult to disentangle
period effects from cohort effects, demographers, epidemiologists, actuaries, and
other population scientists often disagree about cohort effects' relative importance.
In particular, some advocate forecasts of life expectancy based on period trends;
others favor forecasts that hinge on cohort differences. We use a combination of age
decomposition and exchange of survival probabilities between countries to study the
remarkable recent history of female life expectancy in Denmark, a saga of rising,
stagnating, and now again rising lifespans. The gap between female life expectancy
in Denmark vs. Sweden grew to 3.5 y in the period 1975-2000. When we assumed that
Danish women born 1915-1945 had the same survival probabilities as Swedish women,
the gap remained small and roughly constant. Hence, the lower Danish life expectancy
is caused by these cohorts and is not attributable to period effects.
Type
Journal articleSubject
cohort effectsdecomposition
interwar Danish women
life expectancy
period effects
Aged
Aged, 80 and over
Cause of Death
Denmark
Female
Humans
Life Expectancy
Longevity
Population Dynamics
Sweden
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/14648Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1073/pnas.1602783113Publication Info
Lindahl-Jacobsen, Rune; Rau, Roland; Jeune, Bernard; Canudas-Romo, Vladimir; Lenart,
Adam; Christensen, Kaare; & Vaupel, James W (2016). Rise, stagnation, and rise of Danish women's life expectancy. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 113(15). pp. 4015-4020. 10.1073/pnas.1602783113. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/14648.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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James Walton Vaupel
Research Professor Emeritus in the Sanford School of Public Policy
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