Abstrakt
This paper is based on the results of my forthcoming diploma thesis. If we do not consider times of war and famine, till the 1980s "the only well documented sustained national reversals in mortality decline were those that took place during the 1830s to 1850s in industrializing Europe and the USA" (McMichael et al, p. 1155, 2013).
Therefore in 1970s demographers assumed continuous decline in mortality at national level, global convergence of mortality was expected and reversals in mortality decline were seen as unlikely. These presumptions were destroyed by the following development - the HIV/AIDS epidemic and health crisis in former Soviet Union appeared unexpectedly.
Life expectancy decreased in many countries (mostly in countries in sub-Saharan Africa and former Soviet Union). This paper is focused on mortality in 28 European countries and the objective of this paper is to introduce analytical approaches to mortality convergence/divergence, that take into account not just the level of mortality in each country, but also the population size of each country.
Results show widening gap between countries with low and high life expectancy at birth during period 1959-2009. For example: Interquartile range was about 4 years in 1959, it decreased in 1970s, but since 1980s it rapidly increased and in 2009 the gap between the quartiles was about 14 years.
Only about 12 percent of population lived in countries where life expectancy was between 65-76 years in 2009. The rest of population was concentrated below or above this interval - such distribution was not observed in the past.