Abstract
Human mortality tends to decline in the long run, which is fortunate for humans, but less so for pension and health insurance schemes and annuity providers. Empirical studies have shown that rates of mortality improvement depend heavily on the age, gender and country in question, and additionally, they also tend to change in time. More specifically, the historical acceleration of mortality decreases among the elderly and a simultaneous slowdown of improvement at younger ages, which are sometimes jointly referred to as the rotation of the age pattern of mortality decline, have been observed in several populations. After a concise summary of the most relevant literature, this paper suggests a simple, largely data-driven methodology with few assumptions for the empirical examination of the rotation phenomenon in historical mortality datasets. These techniques are then applied on United Nations data from the period between 1950 and 2015 for both genders and all 28 countries of the European Union. The results indicate that rotation has indeed taken place in numerous member states, but its presence is far from universal, and it appears to have been notably more prevalent in populations of women than among men. Life expectancies seem to predict degrees of rotation only in the former Eastern bloc despite prominent literature that suggests otherwise, while increments of life expectancies over the observed period are better predictors of the degrees of rotation in the case of Western European women.
Highlights
Human mortality has decreased significantly since at least the beginning of the past century (Tuljapurkar 2000), which has resulted in an unprecedented increase of human life expectancies
Evidence for rotation is significant at the 5% level in 19 European Union member states for women and 14 countries for men, and only in 11 countries for both genders, which suggests that rotation of the age pattern of mortality decline has been far from universal between 1950 and 2015.15 Apparently, no statistically significant rotation took place in case of either gender in 6 countries (Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, France, Luxembourg and Romania)
Based on detailed data from the period between 1950 and 2015 for both genders and all 28 European Union member states, along with a relatively simple nonparametric, data-driven methodology using only popular, well-known statistical techniques, it is clear that the rotation of the age pattern of mortality improvements has only taken place in part of the 28 members, with only 11 countries displaying statistically significant evidence for rotation at the 5% level in case of both genders, while apparently no rotation at all has occurred in a number of EU countries
Summary
Human mortality has decreased significantly since at least the beginning of the past century (Tuljapurkar 2000), which has resulted in an unprecedented increase of human life expectancies. Despite its nearly univeral occurence, the speed of mortality decline varies heavily by age, gender and country (Lee 2000), and to make things more complicated, mortality improvement rates themselves may very well change in time, even for the same triad of the aforementoned variables (Kannisto et al 1994; Horiuchi and Wilmoth 1995; Lee and Miller 2001; Carter and Prskawetz 2001; Rau et al 2008)
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