Mortality comparisons and age: a new mortality curve

Abstract

This paper introduces a new mortality curve to illustrate and measure mortality and its relation to age. The curve is a form of ‘concentration curve’, and plots the proportion of total deaths against the corresponding proportion of people, where individuals are arranged from youngest to oldest. A mortality index is based on the normalised area measure of the distance of the concentration curve from a ‘best case’ scenario. Results analogous to Lorenz orderings (in the context of income distribution) are derived. The measure is illustrated using mortality data for several countries. The aim is to supplement the standard Crude Death Rate with a ‘mortality-inefficiency’ measure in a composite index of mortality which attends to both the mean and the dispersion of an age-distribution of deaths.