French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED), cours des Humanités, Aubervilliers, 93300, France.
Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB), Wiesbaden, Germany.
Popul Health Metr. 2024 Jun 13;22(1):11. doi: 10.1186/s12963-024-00332-2.
Both enhancing life expectancy and decreasing inequalities in lifespan between social groups are significant goals for public policy. To date, however, methodological tools to study progress in both dimensions simultaneously have been lacking. There is also a consensus that absolute and relative inequalities in lifespan must be studied together.
We introduce a novel graphical representation that combines national mortality rates with both absolute and relative measures of social inequality in mortality. To illustrate our approach, we analyze French and German data stratified by place of residence.
For all-age mortality, in France we find a steady pace of decline in both mortality and in regional inequalities in mortality over recent decades. In Germany, substantial progress was made in the 1990s, mostly driven by convergence between eastern and western Germany, followed by a period of slower progress. Age-specific analyses for Germany reveal a worrying divergence in regional trends at ages 35-74 in recent years, which is particularly pronounced among women.
Our novel visual approach offers a way to simultaneously examine two dimensions of progress in longevity, and facilitates meaningful comparisons between populations, even when their current mortality rates differ. The applied methods can be easily reproduced in any country for which long-term mortality series stratified by region, or any relevant socioeconomic characteristic, are available. It is useful for both scientific analysis and policy advice.
延长预期寿命和减少社会群体之间寿命差距不平等，都是公共政策的重要目标。然而，迄今为止，缺乏同时研究这两个维度进展的方法学工具。人们还普遍认为，必须同时研究寿命的绝对和相对不平等。
我们引入了一种新的图形表示方法，将国家死亡率与死亡率的绝对和相对社会不平等指标相结合。为了说明我们的方法，我们分析了按居住地点划分的法国和德国的数据。
对于全年龄段死亡率，我们发现法国近几十年来死亡率和死亡率的地区不平等都在稳步下降。在德国，20 世纪 90 年代取得了重大进展，主要是由于东德和西德之间的趋同，之后是一个进展较慢的时期。德国的年龄特定分析显示，近年来 35-74 岁人群的地区趋势出现了令人担忧的分歧，女性尤为明显。
我们新颖的可视化方法提供了一种同时检查长寿两个维度进展的方法，并促进了人群之间的有意义比较，即使它们当前的死亡率不同。该方法可以在任何国家轻松复制，只要有按地区或任何相关社会经济特征分层的长期死亡率系列即可。它既适用于科学分析，也适用于政策建议。
