Neglected growth miracles

Hans Rosling gave a really interesting talk at TED last year on links between GDP and life expectancy. I think he had a follow up one this year.

I do not think I am supposed to post link here but a video of his talk is pretty easy to find – and fun to watch.

In the early 1960’s, China was right out of three years of famine following the Great Leap Forward (1958). Death rate reached the post WWII peak. Life expectancy was “unusually” low at about 42 due to both policy error and natural disaster. So if you plot all countries onto a chart of life expectancy vs. per capita GDP, China was an outlier in the early 1960′s. The country had been playing catch-up for the rest of 1960’s. Its current growth rate of 0.2% in life expectancy is on par with countries with average life expectancy of 70+.

I looked into infant mortality about 15 years ago. One of the things I found was that there is a big definitional difference. WHO defines infant mortality as the ratio of deaths before 1 year of age to live births (or somthing like that, I am going from memory)That seems fairly straightforward and well accepted.

The problem is the definition of “live birth”. In the US it is basically any baby, however premature, who takes a single breath. In many other countries it is different. France and germany do not count a live birth until the baby is registered with normally takes 4-6 days. Russia did not count live births of any infant until it had reached a certain weight. A low birth weight baby might not be a live birth for 1-2 months. Japan, for cultural reasons, listed many babies who died in the first couple days as “stillborn” and so on.

This discrepancy in reporting causes the US to appear to have a higher infant mortality rate than many other countries.

The life expectancy rate in the US is affected by these babies that die in the first days after birth. I don’t know how much this will affect overall life expectancy but I suspect that it does so measurably.

Perhaps a better measure would be expectation of life at age 40. That would at least eliminate the infant mortality as a factor.

John Henry

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