Acknowledgements

I am greatly indebted to Professor James W. Vaupel who arranged to computerize my data and to extract from them ever since large numbers of statistical tables and graphs, and finally to have the work published. He and A. Roger Thatcher as well as Dr. Bernard Jeune have greatly helped me with their views, suggestions and comments. Thatcher who has generously given of his time to an intensive correspondence, also contributed the data on England and Wales to this study, and Jeune oversaw as editor its publication.

        Many thanks are due to Mrs. Zhenglian Wang who has produced all the figures and many of the tables in this book, and to Kirill Andreev who with his thorough knowledge of the database has been very helpful. Wang and Andreev are my co-authors for the Annex. I thank Ms. Lis Bluhme for typing the text and many of the tables,  Ms. Vaina Berntsen for assisting in the task and Ms. Klöjgaard for composing the final typescript..

        I gratefully recognize the initial impetus and further encouragement given by Peter Laslett, Advisory Director, Cambridge Group, through the project on Maximal Length of Life which has invited interested colleagues to many useful meetings in Cambridge.

        Finally, I wish to pay tribute to government statisticians past and present who have carefully tended the vital statistics of their respective countries and have been helpful to me in assembling the data.

Lisbon, December 1995

Väinö Kannisto

Updated by V. Castanova, 1 November 1999