Understanding Recent Fluctuations in Life Expectancy: The Uneven Progress across Social Groups in France, 2011-2019

Emmanuelle Cambois , Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)
Ophélie Merville, Inserm
Florian Bonnet, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)
Carlo Giovanni Camarda, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)

Life expectancy (LE) has been regularly subject to fluctuations in the past decades in high income countries, due to critical health episodes. Beside dramatic crisis such as flue pandemics, heatwave in 2003 in Europe, US opioid epidemic and COVID-19 pandemic, LE is affected by large-scale and regular seasonal shocks that induce mortality peaks. In this paper, we analyze LEs progress through several mortality peaks in France (2012, 2015, 2017) to identify whether social groups reacted differently to these shocks. We use the French census mortality follow-up (EDP) and P-Spline models to compute LEs across occupational classes (OCs) from 2011 to 2019. Our preliminary results show uneven trends in LEs across sex and OCs, with a widening gap in women but reduced in men. We find diverse mortality dynamics across OCs during health crisis with both immediate and delayed effect of seasonal health episodes. Health episodes have sex and OCs specific impact on LE, deserving further exploration.

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 Presented in Session 35. Social Inequalities in Mortality