Life Expectancy

Life expectancy has increased rapidly since the onset of industrialization and modernization. In a
pre-modern, poor world, life expectancy was around 30 years in every country. In the early 19th
century, life expectancy started to increase in the early industrialized countries while it stayed
low in the rest of the world. Just half a century ago, the health of the world was very unequal;
there was good health in the rich countries and persistent bad health in those countries that
remained poor. But this global inequality is decreasing. Countries that not long ago were
suffering from bad health are catching up rapidly. No country in the world has a lower life
expectancy than the the countries with the highest life expectancy in 1800. Since 1900 the global
average life expectancy has more than doubled and is now approaching 70 years.

Empirical View
Rising Life Expectancy around the World
The visualization below shows the dramatic increase in life expectancy over the last few
centuries.For the UK the country for which we have the longest time-series we see that
before the 19th century there was no trend for life expectancy: life expectancy fluctuated
between 30 and 40 years.
Over the last 200 years people in all countries in the world achieved impressive progress in
health that lead to increases in life expectancy. In the UK life expectancy doubled and is now
more than 80 years. In Japan health started to improve later, but the country caught up quickly
with the UK and surpassed it in the late 1960s. In South Korea health started to improve later and
the country achieved even faster progress than the UK and Japan and by now life expectancy in
South Korea has surpassed life expectancy in the UK.
The chart also shows how low life expectancy was in some countries in the past: A century ago
life expectancy in India and South Korea was as low as 23 years. A century later, life expectancy
in India has almost tripled and in South Korea it has almost quadrupled.
You can switch to the map view to compare life expectancy across countries. This view shows
that there are still huge differences between countries: People in Sub-Saharan countries have a
life expectancy of less than 50, while life expectancy is over 80 in Japan.

Life Expectancy by Age

Yes, the decline of child mortality matters a lot for the increase of life expectancy. But as this
chart shows there is much more to it.
Before the onset of modernity life was short. The gains in life expectancy since then were mostly
due to changing mortality patterns at a young age: It was common that every 3rd or even 2nd
child died, and it has dropped dramatically since then. See the data entry on child mortality on
OurWorldInData.
But this chart here shows that the increase of life expectancy was by far not entirely due to the
decrease in child mortality: Child mortality is defined as the number of children dying before
their 5th birthday. To see how life expectancy has improved without taking child mortality into
account we therefore have to look at the prospects of a child who just survived their 5th birthday:
In 1845 a 5-year old had a expectancy to live 55 years. Today a 5-year old can expect to live 82
years. An increase of 27 years.
And also at higher ages mortality patterns have changed. A 50-year old could expect do live
twenty more years. Today the life expectancy of a 50-year old is 83!
And another important change can be studied in this chart: Health inequality decreased hugely.
Look by how much life expectancy differed by age in 1845 from 40 years for newborns to 79
for 70-year olds. Today this span is much smaller from 81 to 86. This is because the chance of
dying at a younger age has been steadily decreasing, which means that the equality of life spans
has increased.

Total life expectancy in the UK by age, 1541-2011 Max

Roser1
Life expectancy in each region of the world stayed fairly
stable for most of history until the onset of the health
transition, the period in which life expectancy began to
increase to do increased industrialization and
modernization. The health transition occurred at different
times for different regions; for instance, Oceania began to
see increases in life expectancy around 1870, while Africa
didnt begin to see increases until around 1920. For more

about increases in modernization around the globe, see

our page on democratization.
Global life expectancy (weighted average) and by world
region, 1770-2012 Max Roser2
Full screen view Download Data

Estimates of life expectancy before and after health

transition by region, 1800-2001 Riley (2005)3
Period when earliest health transition in region began
Life expectancy before health transition
1800
1820
1850
1870
1900
1913
1950
1973
1990
2001

Life expectancy Increased in All Countries of

the World
There is a lot of information in this following rather unusual chart. On the x-axis you find the
cumulative share of the world population. And all the countries of the world are ordered along
the x-axis ascending by the life expectancy of the population. On the y-axis you see the life
expectancy
of
each
country.
For 1800 (red line) you see that the countries on the left India and also South Korea have a
life expectancy around 25. On the very right you see that in 1800 no country had a life
expectancy above 40 (Belgium had the highest life expectancy with just 40 years).
In 1950 the life expectancy of all countries was higher than in 1800 and the richer countries in
Europe and North America had life expectancies over 60 years over the course of
modernization and industrialization the health of the population improved dramatically. But half
of the worlds population look at India and China made only little progress. Therefore the
world in 1950 was highly unequal in living standards clearly devided between developed
countries
and
developing
countries.
This division is ending: Look at the change between 1950 and 2012! Now it is the former
developing countries the countries that were worst off in 1950 that achieved the fastest
progress. While some countries (mostly in Africa) are lacking behind. But many of the former
developing countries have caught up and we achieved a dramatic reduction of global health
inequality.
The world developed from equally poor health in 1800 to great inequality in 1950 and back to
more equality today but equality on a much higher level.

Life expectancy of the world population, 1800, 1950 and

2012 Max Roser4
How to read the following graph: On the x-axis you
find the cumulative share of the world population. The
countries are ordered along the x-axis ascending by the
life expectancy of the population.

These world maps demonstrate the same trend as earlier

graphs: increases in life expectancy happened globally, but
occurred especially rapidly in areas of increasing
industrialization and democratization.
World maps of life expectancy, 1800, 1950 and 2011 Max
Roser5

Full screen view

Full screen view

Full screen view Download the three maps as one image

The following graph shows multiple pieces of information.
The points represent the highest life expectancy at that
point in time, and the shape of the point indicates the
country to which this highest value belonged. For instance,
we can see that in the mid-1800s, Norway had the highest
life expectancy, but then by 1880 people in non-Maori
New Zealand were expected to live the longest lives. The
solid horizontal line represents the results of the linear
regression on all these points; remarkably, these points
seem to follow this linear trend very closely. The gray
dashed line is the extension of this trend into the future,
and the red dashed lines represent the projections of
female life expectancy in Japan published by the UN in
1986, 1999, and 2001. Multiple predictions of life
expectancy over the years are listed on the right. The
horizontal black lines extending from the publication
denote the prediction in each publication of the maximum
possible life expectancy attainable by humans and the year
in which the study was published. Its interesting to note
that Dublin published a study in about 1930 that predicted
the maximum life expectancy possible was less than 65 at

the same time life expectancy in New Zealand was already

over 65. As time went on, researchers were more likely to
say that the contemporary maximum life expectancy was
as high as it was ever going to get, but they were proved
wrong over and over.
Record female life expectancy including time trend and
asserted ceilings on life expectancy, 1840 to the present
Oeppen and Vaupel (2002)6

The median age of a countrys population is an indicator

demographic makeup of the country and of its the
population growth. These maps show that most of the
worlds population is aging; in general, the median age is
increasing around the world. However, many parts of subSaharan Africa still have incredibly youthful populations,
indicating that birth rates are high and life expectancy is
lower. In countries with higher median populations, the
birth rates are lower and life expectancy tends to be
higher.
World maps of the median age of the population Max
Roser7
Full screen view Open in new tab Download
Data Download static image

Correlates, Determinants &

Consequences
Life expectancy and GDP
This graph displays the correlation between life expectancy and growth domestic product (GDP)
per capita. In general, countries with higher GDP have a higher life expectancy. The relationship
seems to follow a logarithmic trend: the unit increase in life expectancy per unit increase in GDP
is much higher for countries with GDP below approximately 6,000 international dollars.

Life expectancy vs. GDP per capita (in International 1990

Geary-Khamis Dollars) Max Roser8

Life Expectancy and Intelligence

A recent study by Rosalind Arden et al (2015)9 analyzes the causes for the link between
intelligence and longer lifespan. They note that many previous studies have found this
correlation, distinguishing the cause of the relationship is difficult. Common causes posited
include socioeconomic status affecting both intelligence and life expectancy, higher intelligence
causing more healthy behavior choices, and shared genetic factors influencing both intelligence
and health. By analyzing three data sets of twins from the US, Sweden and Denmark, they
determined that genetics contributed the most to the correlation between lifespan and
intelligence.

Data Quality & Definition

Life expectancy is the average number of years a child born now would live if currentmortality
patterns were to stay the same.

Data Sources
Long-term

Long-run data on life expectancy at birth for the time period since 1800 is available at
the Clio Infra project. It is online here.

Long-term data is available at Lifetable.de. Lifetable.de a project by researchers at the

Max Planck Institute in Rostock, the University of Berkeley and the Institut national
dtudes dmographiques in Paris presents life expectancy estimates drawn from some
700 sources. The estimates along with the sources are presented at lifetable.de.

Gapminder presents estimates for life expectancy since 1800 here they are plotted over
time. The documentation can be found here.

Post 1960

Annual data on Life expectancy at birth [by country] since 1961 is available in
theWorld Development Indicators (WDI) published by the World Bank. For the male
population, for the female population and for the total population.

The World Health Organization (WHO) publishes data on life expectancy here. Data
are only available for the time after 1990.

Other more specialized data are available in the The Human Mortality Database (free
but registration is necessary).

The Eurostat website Statistics Explained publishes up-to-date statistical information

on Mortality and life expectancy here.

1.

Wikipedia includes a List of countries by life expectancy which includes up-to-date

data from different sources.

The visualiaation shows the total life expectancy since birth and not the remaining life expectancy.
The data for life expectancy by age is taken from the Human Mortality Database. University of California, Berkeley
(USA), and Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (Germany). Available at www.mortality.org (data
downloaded on 11 February 2014 being granted permission to use this data for the visualization on 13 February
2014).
The data on life expectancy at birth before 1845 is taken the data from Kertzer and Laslett (1995) see below.
Their sources are the British official statistics and Wrigley and Schofield [1981] 1989.
Kertzer and Laslett (eds) (1995) Aging in the Past: Demography, Society, and Old Age. Berkeley: University of
California Press. Online here.

2.

(The Human Mortality Database data refers to remaining life expectancy for people in a 5 year age bracket (1014, 15-19, ). To calculate total life expectancy I have added the lower bound of each range to the remaining life
expectancy for the given age group the values here should therefore be understood as the lower bound for total
life expectancy.)
I have taken the data for 1770 to 2000 from James C. Riley (2005) Estimates of Regional and Global Life
Expectancy, 18002001. Issue Population and Development Review. Population and Development Review.
Volume 31, Issue 3, pages 537543, September 2005. Online at JSTOR here. For this project life expectancy
estimates have been drawn from some 700 sources. The estimates along with the sources are presented online
at lifetable.de.

3.

The author James Riley estimates the period when earliest health transition began for each region and gives an
estimate for the life expectancy prior to the transition, this is shown here.
For the last year (2012) the data is taken from the WHO. The discrepancy between the WHO estimate and Rileys
estimate for 2000 is small.
James C. Riley (2005) Estimates of Regional and Global Life Expectancy, 18002001. Issue Population
and Development Review. Population and Development Review. Volume 31, Issue 3, pages 537543, September
2005. Online at JSTORhere.
For this project life expectancy estimates have been drawn from some 700 sources. The estimates along with the
sources are presented online at lifetable.de.
Notes:
a) The global average is weighted by the population sizes and relies on Angus Maddisons population estimates.
b) There is too little information available to estimate Oceanias population in 1800 or 1820.

4.

5.

c) A life expectancy of 22.5 years refers to the indigenous population. For the Europeans he estimates a life
expectancy of 45.6 years.
The data on life expectancy is taken from Version 7 of the dataset published by Gapminder. The
documentation is onlinehere. The data on the population of each country is taken from Gapminder. The data and
the documentation can be foundhere.
The included world population in 1800 is 1,036 billion. In 1950 it is 2,72 billion. And for 2012 it is the life
expectancy of that year and the population measures refer to 2010 (7 billion people are included in this analysis).
The data on life expectancy for 1800 is taken from the Clio Infra project. It is online here.

The data for 1950 is taken from version 7 of the life expectancy dataset published by Gapminder. The
documentation and data is online here.

6.

7.

8.

9.

The data for 2011 is taken from the World Health Organizations Global Health Observatory Data Repository
which is onlinehere.
The source is Oeppen and Vaupel (2002) Broken Limits to Life Expectancy. In Science, 296, 5570, 1029
1031. Onlinehere.
Note from the source: The linear-regression trend is depicted by a bold black line (slope = 0.243) and the
extrapolated trend by a dashed gray line. The horizontal black lines show asserted ceilings on life expectancy,
with a short vertical line indicating the year of publication. The dashed red lines denote projections of female life
expectancy in Japan published by the United Nations in 1986, 1999, and 2001.
This data is taken from the UN Population Division, The 2012 Revision.
The median is the age that divides the population in two parts of equal size, that is, there are as many persons
with ages above the median as there are with ages below the median (definition according to the UN data
source).
The data on life expectancy is taken from Version 7 of the dataset published by Gapminder. The
documentation is onlinehere.
Data on GDP per capita is taken from Bolt, J. and J. L. van Zanden (2013). The First Update of the Maddison
Project; Re-Estimating Growth Before 1820. Maddison Project Working Paper 4. This is the New Maddison
Project Database which is an updated version of the original Maddison dataset. This is the version updated in
January 2013. It is online here.
Data for 1800 is scarce and when not available for a particular country data for 1820 was used.
Rosalind Arden, Michelle Luciano, Ian J Deary, Chandra A Reynolds, Nancy L Pedersen, Brenda L
Plassman, Matt McGue, Kaare Christensen, and Peter M Visscher. The association between intelligence and
lifespan is mostly genetic. Int. J. Epidemiol. First published online July 26, 2015
doi:10.1093/ije/dyv112. Online here.