Do Japanese and Italian women live longer than women in Scandinavia?

TL;DR

This paper compares long-term life expectancy of women in Japan, Italy, and Scandinavia using cohort data to avoid biases in period life tables, revealing different insights into longevity than traditional methods.

Contribution

It introduces a cohort-based approach to compare women's life expectancy across countries, addressing biases in period life tables.

Findings

Italian women may lose more years than Scandinavian women.

Japanese women do not necessarily lose fewer years than Scandinavian women.

Cohort data provides a different perspective on longevity comparisons.

Abstract

Life expectancies at birth are routinely computed from period life tables. Such period life expectancies may be distorted by selection when comparing countries where the living conditions improved earlier (like Norway and Sweden) with countries where they improved later (like Italy and Japan). One way to get a fair comparison between the countries, is to use cohort data and consider the expected number of years lost before a given age a. Contrary to the results based on period data, one then finds that Italian women may expect to lose more years than women in Norway and Sweden, while there are no indications that Japanese women will lose fewer years than Scandinavian women.