The Multistate Life Table

Abstract

The multistate life table is a method developed in demography to describe the mortality and mobility experience of a cohort, a group of people born in a same period. The multistate life table is an extension of the life table, which describes the mortality experience. The life table was first developed in the seventeenth century by John Graunt. Graunt was interested in estimating probabilities of survival from observations on deaths. The life table is an established method in demography (see, e.g. Preston et al. 2001). In the 1970s Andrei Rogers extended the life table to include migrations between regions in addition to mortality (Rogers 1975). It soon became clear that regions may be replaced by states and interregional migrations by transitions between states. That resulted in the multistate life table and the wider field of multistate demography (Land and Rogers 1982). Today the multistate life table is used to describe life histories from birth to death. In this chapter I present functions for estimating multistate life table indicators. Age is the duration variable used throughout the chapter. The age intervals considered are of 1-year length.