Volume 44 - Article 44 | Pages 1073–1084  

The role of reductions in old-age mortality in old-age population growth

By Vladimir Canudas-Romo, Tianyu Shen, Collin Payne

Abstract

Background: The variable-r model provides demographers with a way to explore the contributions of demographic components (fertility, mortality, migration) to changes in populations’ age structures. However, traditional variable-r methods require extremely long mortality series to explore growth at oldest-old ages.

Objective: Our goal is to disentangle the old-age growth rate into two main components: the growth rate at some younger age, and reductions in mortality between the younger and older ages.

Methods: We focus on an adaptation of the variable-r model that can use shorter mortality series to explore population growth between two ages.

Results: Using data from the Human Mortality Database, we explore how these two components are driving the growth rate of 100-year-olds. Observed growth of those reaching age 100 results primarily from the high growth rates when those cohorts were 80-year-olds, and from time reductions in cohort mortality between ages 80 and 100. However, the latter component behaves differently across populations, with some countries experiencing recent slowdowns in cohort mortality declines or increases in mortality between ages 80 and 100.

Conclusions: We find great diversity in the level of old-age mortality improvements across populations, and heterogeneity in the drivers of these improvements. Our findings highlight the need to closely monitor the underlying reasons for the changes in old-age mortality across populations and time.

Contribution: We present illustrations of the use of the variable-r method to monitor demographic change in an online interactive application, estimated even when only short historical series of demographic data are available.

Author's Affiliation

• Vladimir Canudas-Romo - Australian National University, Australia EMAIL
• Tianyu Shen - Australian National University, Australia EMAIL
• Collin Payne - Australian National University, Australia EMAIL

Other articles by the same author/authors in Demographic Research

Subnational contribution to life expectancy and life span variation changes: Evidence from the United States
Volume 50 - Article 22

Variable-r in sex ratios: Formulas in honor of Jim Vaupel
Volume 49 - Article 26

Comparative evidence of years lived with reproductive-age morbidity in sub-Saharan Africa (2010‒2019)
Volume 49 - Article 6

Expected years ever married
Volume 38 - Article 47

Coherent forecasts of mortality with compositional data analysis
Volume 37 - Article 17

The population-level impact of public-sector antiretroviral therapy rollout on adult mortality in rural Malawi
Volume 36 - Article 37

Decomposing changes in life expectancy: Compression versus shifting mortality
Volume 33 - Article 14

The Gompertz force of mortality in terms of the modal age at death
Volume 32 - Article 36

Cause-specific measures of life years lost
Volume 29 - Article 41

The crossover between life expectancies at birth and at age one: The imbalance in the life table
Volume 24 - Article 4

The differential impact of mortality of American troops in the Iraq War: The non-metropolitan dimension
Volume 23 - Article 2

No consistent effects of prenatal or neonatal exposure to Spanish flu on late-life mortality in 24 developed countries
Volume 22 - Article 20

An integrated approach to cause-of-death analysis: cause-deleted life tables and decompositions of life expectancy
Volume 19 - Article 35

The modal age at death and the shifting mortality hypothesis
Volume 19 - Article 30

Changing mortality and average cohort life expectancy
Volume 13 - Article 5

Age-specific contributions to changes in the period and cohort life expectancy
Volume 13 - Article 3

Decomposing demographic change into direct vs. compositional components
Volume 7 - Article 1

Most recent similar articles in Demographic Research

Differences in mortality before retirement: The role of living arrangements and marital status in Denmark
Volume 50 - Article 20    | Keywords: inequalities, living arrangements, marital status, mortality, retirement

Racial classification as a multistate process
Volume 50 - Article 17    | Keywords: Brazil, demography, increments to life, life expectancy, life table, mortality, multistate, race/ethnicity

Cohort fertility of immigrants to Israel from the former Soviet Union
Volume 50 - Article 13    | Keywords: age at first birth, assimilation, cohort analysis, fertility, immigration, parity, religiosity

Measuring short-term mobility patterns in North America using Facebook advertising data, with an application to adjusting COVID-19 mortality rates
Volume 50 - Article 10    | Keywords: COVID-19, data collection, Facebook, mortality, North America, short-term mobility

Immigrant mortality advantage in the United States during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic
Volume 50 - Article 7    | Keywords: COVID-19, immigrants, mortality