Inequalities in Regional Excess Mortality and Life Expectancy during the Covid-19 Pandemic in Europe

Csaba G. Tóth , Centre for Economic and Regional Studies and Corvinus University of Budapest
Tamás Hajdu, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies
Judit Krekó, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies

Our research aimed to investigate how the COVID-19 pandemic changed the differences between the mortality conditions of the European regions. We first estimated the regional excess mortality rate from the first week of 2020 to the final week of 2022 for 201 NUTS 2 regions in Europe. The results show significant differences in successive years of the pandemic, not only in the size of the mortality burden but also in its geographical distribution. Next, we took pre-pandemic (2015-2019) life expectancy as a measure of health capital and compared it with the regional excess mortality rate during the pandemic. We found a significant negative relationship for the whole period, especially in 2021, meaning that lower health capital was associated with higher excess mortality per million population. This pattern is consistent with our main results on the changing regional variation of the mortality conditions due to the pandemic. We found that the regional variation in life expectancy that was stable over the five years before the pandemic increased slightly in 2020, significantly jumped in 2021, and returned to almost its pre-pandemic level in 2022. By analyzing different parts of the distribution from the perspective of pre-pandemic life expectancy, we found that the increase in variance was due to higher mortality in countries with a lower pre-pandemic life expectancy (health capital). In addition, we found that while a large part of the increase in total variance in 2021 was due to increasing between-country differences, within-country variation also contributed significantly.

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 Presented in Session 18. The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Health, Wellbeing and Morbidity