How Did Mortality Selection Change the Future of the Past?

• In Event: 140 - Regular Session. Demographic Processes in the U.S., China, and Europe

Abstract

This paper proposes a conceptual framework to understand how the effects of mortality selection on cohort trends in life-course mortality pattern and epidemiologic transition may be shaped by different historical mechanisms for the decline in pandemics. Among early-transition countries, socioeconomic development suppressed pandemics and triggered a cohort evolution mechanism, yielding a moderate reduction in mortality selection at early ages that did not override cohort evolution mechanisms. In contrast, among later-transition countries, medical advancements did not trigger cohort evolution mechanisms, but instead generated a substantial reduction in mortality selection in early life. This made cohorts born later, during the age of receding pandemics, have higher mortality rates at early and middle adulthood but lower mortality rates in late adulthood, as compared to preceding cohorts. This phenomenon should produce a crossover of mortality rates across age groups over successive time periods; and, past the age of receding pandemics, stagnation followed by an increase in life expectancy. In later-transition countries, further declines in early-life mortality will be driven by socioeconomic development and will begin to resemble the trend among early-transition countries. Using the Human Mortality Database, we compare three epidemiologic transition models represented by Sweden, Japan, Poland and Bulgaria, and find support for this conceptual framework.

Authors

• Hui Zheng, The Ohio State University

• Siwei Cheng, New York University