Short-Term Mortality Fluctuations and Longevity Risk-Adjusted Age: Learning the Resilience of a Country to a Health Shock

Abstract

Recent studies have attempted to measure differences in lifestyle quality across the world. This paper contributes to this strand of literature by extending the indicator introduced in Milevsky (2020), i.e., “longevity-risk-adjusted global age” (LRaG age), to deal with the new short-term mortality fluctuation data series freely available from the Human Mortality Database. The new weekly data on mortality allow measuring weekly biological age. The weekly differences between biological and chronological ages across countries were used to assess country resilience to the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of excess mortality and health expenditure. Countries with a biological age lower than the chronological age had a lower excess mortality in 2020–2021 and a lower health expenditure, thus indicating some resilience to the shock of COVID-19.