Book chapter
Смертность и продолжительность жизни
Regional variation of all features of mortality is quite significant. Being noted for many decades The North-Ost gradient of increased mortality rate continues its trend. In a time despite essential regional variation of mortality the difference in the orientation of its dynamic is not significant at all. An important condition for development of measures to ensure a decrease of mortality rate is information on social and demographic factors.
BACKGROUND The long-term historical decline in infant mortality has been accompanied by increasing concentration of infant deaths at the earliest stages of infancy. In the mid-1960s Coale and Demeny developed formulas describing the dependency of the average age of death in infancy on the level of infant mortality, based on data obtained up to that time. OBJECTIVE In the more developed countries a steady rise in average age of infant death began in the mid-1960s. This paper documents this phenomenon and offers alternative formulas for calculation of the average age of death, taking into account the new mortality trends. METHODS Standard statistical methodologies and a specially developed method are applied to the linked individual birth and infant death datasets available from the US National Center for Health Statistics and the initial (raw) numbers of deaths from the Human Mortality Database. RESULTS It is demonstrated that the trend of decline in the average age of infant death becomes interrupted when the infant mortality rate attains a level around 10 per 1000, and modifications of the Coale-Demeny formulas for practical application to contemporary low levels of mortality are offered.
vCONCLUSIONS The average age of death in infancy is an important characteristic of infant mortality, although it does not influence the magnitude of life expectancy. That the increase in average age of death in infancy is connected with medical advances is proposed as a possible explanation.
A general algorithm for the decomposition of differences between two values of an aggregate demographic measure of age and other dimensions is realized as Excel/VBA. It assumes that the aggregate measure is computed from similar matrices of discrete demographic data for two populations under comparison. The algorithm estimates the effects of replacement for each elementary cell of one matrix by the respective cell of another matrix. The replacement runs from young to old ages.