United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, New York, 2012 - 61 p.The potential to live a long and healthy life is a fundamental aspect of human development.
The second part of the twentieth century witnessed enormous progress in improving health and survival around the world. Life expectancy at birth for the world population rose from 48 years in
1950-1955 to 68 years in 2005-2010. However, wide disparities remain in levels of mortality across countries and regions. Those differences reflect inequalities in access to food, safe drinking water, sanitation, medical care and other basic human needs. They also reflect differences in risk factors, behavioural choices and societal contexts that affect the survival of individuals. The reduction of mortality, particularly child and maternal mortality, is part of the internationally agreed development goals, such as those contained in the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development and in the United Nations Millennium Declaration.
The international community has recently focused attention on the challenges to development posed by morbidity and mortality due to the non-communicable diseases as well, in part through
the 2011 Political Declaration on the Prevention and Control of Non-communicable Diseases.
To fulfil its task of documenting levels and trends of mortality, the Population Division of
the Department of Economic Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat presents this new report
entitled Changing Levels and Trends in Mortality: the role of patterns of deaths by cause. The
report aims to describe global and regional levels and trends in life expectancy at birth and assess
the contribution of various major causes of death to differences in survival between populations.
The analysis incorporates life table values for regions representing 230 countries or areas from the
Population Division’s World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision, as well as estimates of the
distribution of deaths by cause from the World Health Organization’s Mortality estimates by cause,
age and sex for the year 2008. The report provides a detailed analysis of the sex- and age-patterns
of mortality that produce regional trends and differences in the levels of life expectancy at birth. In
addition, the report contains a decomposition analysis to pinpoint the specific causes of death that
are responsible for deficits in survival among populations of selected regions compared to the
longest-lived populations in the world.
The Population Division is grateful to the World Health Organization for providing the
country-level sex- and age-disaggregated estimates of the number of deaths by cause in 2008.
Responsibility for any errors or omissions rests solely with the Population Division.
