Dynamics of the Gini Coefficient of the Life Table

José Manuel Aburto , CPop, University of Southern Denmark
Ugofilippo Basellini, Max Planck Institute for demographic Research
Annette Baudisch, Interdisciplinary Centre on Population Dynamics (CPop)
Francisco Villavicencio, Johns Hopkins University

Lifespan variation or lifespan inequality has increasingly received attention as health indicator because it represents the uncertainty about the eventual death an individual experiences. In this paper we take a closer look at the Gini coefficient of the life table (G) and provide additional insights to understand how it relates to improvements in mortality. We focus on how changes over time of the Gini coefficient relate to changes in life expectancy and a new measure called v that relates to perturbation theory. We provide a mathematical foundation of how the Gini coefficient evolves over time and give analytical formulas to find the threshold age that define premature deaths for this indicator in the sense that mortality improvements below this age decreases lifespan variation and increase life expectancy. These results provide important implications for understanding trends of lifespan variation over time and age.

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 Presented in Session 30. Life Tables and Applications