MPIDR Technical Report

R programs for writing HMD life tables and HMD death rates to pooled data files

Abstract

The Human Mortality Database (HMD) website provides an opportunity for downloading output data as zipped files. Unzipping these files returns folders that contain numerous data files, which correspond to age-by-year data formats (1x1, 5x1, 1x5, 5x5, … ), sexes, and dozens of country-populations. For many analyses, however, it would be more practical to operate with long data file containing many populations rather than large number of population-specific files. Herewith, we provide two simple programs for: 1) pooling together life tables’ for many countries and years in a single file and 2) death rates for many countries and years in a single file.