Putting Oeppen and Vaupel to Work: On the Road to New Stochastic Mortality Forecasts
Abstract
Oeppen and Vaupel (2002) revolutionized the field of human mortality forecasting by showing that best-practice life expectancy has risen almost linearly from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. In this paper, we present a methodology that makes use of that finding. We show that among a set of 14 low mortality countries, the distribution of life expectancies in the last 40 years has had almost perfectly linear mean and median values. We use this observation to estimate the parameters of models that include both trend error and idiosyncratic error. We compare the outcomes of the new procedure with the United Nations (2003) forecasts for Germany, Japan, and the U.S., where only mortality rates differ. The projections are most similar for Japan and most different for the U.S.