Reassessing Socioeconomic Inequalities in Mortality via Distributional Similarities

Ana Cristina Gomez Ugarte Valerio , Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Ugofilippo Basellini, Max Planck Institute for demographic Research
Carlo Giovanni Camarda, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)
Fanny Janssen, Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI) and University of Groningen
Emilio Zagheni, Max Planck Institute for demographic Research

Commonly used measures of socioeconomic inequalities in mortality, such as the slope index and the relative index of inequality, are based on summary measures of the group-specific age-at-death distributions (e.g.~standardized mortality rate or life expectancy). While this approach is informative, it ignores valuable information contained in the different distributions. We propose a mortality inequality measure that readily captures the distributional difference between two or more population's subgroups. Leveraging a metric of statistical distance, our Population Total Variation (PTV) measure is sensitive not only to changes in the means or variances, but also to broader mortality changes that affect distributional shapes. We use observed mortality data by socioeconomic groups to asses mortality inequalities with both established measures and our proposed PTV. Our findings suggest that conventional summary-based measures can bias our understanding of socioeconomic inequalities in mortality. We present applications based on educational groups and groups defined by an area-level deprivation measure to exemplify how the PTV can be applied in different data availability contexts. We conclude that measuring distributional similarities in mortality enhances our understanding of between-group inequalities in mortality.

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 Presented in Session 35. Social Inequalities in Mortality