Mortality Forecasts and Linear Life Expectancy Trends

Abstract

Two important articles on aggregate mortality trends were published in the spring of 2002, with important implications for our perspective on modeling, forecasting, and interpreting mortality trends. One such article was Oeppen and Vaupel (2002, henceforth OV), which shows a remarkable linear trend in the female life expectancy (at birth, period basis) of the national population with the highest value for this variable from 1840 to 2000. Of course the set of nations reporting credible life expectancy values has greatly expanded over this period, but that is unlikely to have mattered much for the results. Over this entire 160-year period, the record life expectancy consistently increased by 0.24 years of life per calendar year of time, or at the rate of 24 years per century. Extrapolation would lead us to expect a female life expectancy of around 108 years at the end of the twenty-first century.