Research Group

Lifespan Inequalities

At a Glance Projects Publications Team

Project

Patterns and Drivers of Mortality Inequality Across Space, Time, and Socioeconomic Status

Conducted by Alyson van Raalte; Marília R. Nepomuceno; in Collaboration with Timothy Riffe (Universidad del País Vasco, Leioa, Bizkaia, Spain), José Manuel Aburto (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, United Kingdom), Vanessa Di Lego (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna Institute of Demography, Austria), Nikkil Sudharsanan (Technical University of Munich, Germany), Ridhi Kashyap (University of Oxford, United Kingdom), Orsola Torrisi (New York University Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates), Pavel Grigoriev, Sebastian Klüsener (both: Federal Institute for Population Research, Wiesbaden, Germany)

Detailed Description

The most prominent theories of global mortality convergence were developed at a time when high quality mortality data was lacking for most of the world. This also holds true at the subnational level, where only a handful of countries could track long-term inequalities in mortality by socioeconomic status.

Although important data gaps persist, slowly, we are getting a better picture of how age patterns of mortality are changing over time, in different regions, and across socioeconomic groups. The picture that is emerging is one of greater diversity in mortality change than was originally anticipated.

The objectives of this project are to document these longer-term patterns of mortality and to explore the persisting and emerging drivers of inequality. With this evidence, we critically examine whether our theoretical frameworks of mortality decline, convergence, and inequality are indeed universal or confined to the most-studied populations.

We tackle these objectives, using a combination of data sources: the Human Mortality Database for high-quality national data on period and cohort mortality; the Human Cause-of-Death Database, the WHO mortality database, and the Global Burden of Disease database for cause of death data from different countries and regions; Finnish and Swedish register data for detailed, long-term, individual-level mortality data by socioeconomic status; census-linked aggregate mortality data by level of completed education for several European countries or regions collected by the European Commission-funded LIFEPATH project (Grant # 633666); and European regional-level mortality data harmonized under the European Research Council-funded REDIM project (Grant # 851485).

We use a diverse set of tools to answer these questions, including life table methods, decomposition analysis, counterfactual analysis, and epidemiological methods.

This project is funded by a starting grant from the European Research Council (Grant # 716323), with a generous funding extension from the Max Planck Society.

Publications

Aburto, J. M.; Di Lego, V.; Riffe, T.; Kashyap, R.; van Raalte, A. A.; Torrisi, O.:

A global assessment of the impact of violence on lifetime uncertainty

Science Advances 9:5, 1–10. (2023)    

Grigoriev, P.; Klüsener, S.; van Raalte, A. A.:

Quantifying the contribution of smoking to regional mortality disparities in Germany: a cross-sectional study

BMJ Open 12:9, e064249–e064249. (2022)    

Sudharsanan, N.; Aburto, J. M.; Riffe, T.; van Raalte, A. A.:

Large variation in the epidemiological transition across countries: is it still valuable as a mortality theory? [Commentary]

International Journal of Epidemiology 51:4, 1057–1061. (2022)    

van Raalte, A. A.:

What have we learned about mortality patterns over the past 25 years?

Population Studies 75:Suppl. 1, S105–S132. (2021)