Life expectancy

Life expectancy was developed in order to provide a picture of how long people are 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 given age is expected to live, assuming that the likelihood of death on which the life table (showing the ages to which a particular birth cohort survives) is based does not change in the future.

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

Likelihood of death refers to the probability of a person dying before reaching the subsequent age in years. The probability of dying 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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