Convergence in Life Expectancy

Life expectancy at birth has increased significantly worldwide over the past 200 years, but there are still large differences between developed and developing countries. Over the past 50 years, there has been some convergence between certain groups of countries. The growing importance of longevity research in the world makes the economic aspects of the subject particularly topical. If we break down countries by income, we find that low-income countries and upper-middle-income countries have experienced greater growth than high-income countries over the past 50 years. This represents a certain degree of convergence. In this chapter, we try to look in depth at the causes of the direction of causality and examine other relevant economic variables that explain the trends by groups of countries. We divide the countries under study into homogeneous groups according to income and various institutional variables and examine how convergence is evolving within and across groups. The world average increased every year from 1970 to 2019 but fell back by almost a year in 2020, apparently due to the effects of COVID-19, so the long-term conclusions are only drawn up to 2019. The main part of the chapter is a panel regression, in which we analyzed the relationship between the included variables and life expectancy.