Life expectancy

Life expectancy was developed in order to provide a picture of how long people can be expected to live based on current data. It indicates how long people live on average, assuming that the chance of death in each year of life that applies in the relevant year continue to apply. The chance of death changes from year to year, and so the period life expectancy can primarily be seen as a summary measure of mortality in a given year.

Period life expectancy is the number of years that a person of a selected age can be expected to live, assuming that the chance of death on which the survival table is based does not change in the future.

A period life expectancy table indicates how many babies born today will reach the age of 0, 1, 2 years per 100 thousand births, based on the mortality ratio actually been recorded for a given period.

Chance of death refers to the likelihood of a person dying before they reach the subsequent age in years. The chance of death is calculated as the recorded number of deaths per 100 thousand during the relevant period in the average (actual) population of the same age and sex.

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