Jean-Marie Robine Public Lecture.
The most developed countries with low mortality (i.e. the well-established market economies of Australia, Japan, North America, and Western Europe), whose life expectancies (LE) at birth or at age 65 were strongly converging since the end of the Second World, entered an unexpected phase of divergence in the 1970s.
For about twenty years, between roughly 1975 and 1995, gaps have widened between Japan -where LE kept its previous pace of increase- and Denmark -where LE almost stopped increasing-, and between France -where LE also kept its previous pace of increase although slower than in Japan- and the United States of America (USA) or the Netherlands -where the increase in LE notably slowed down. Even if all these countries have continued identical parallel increasing paths since the middle of the 1990s, the significant gaps built up during this period of divergence still remain.
Moreover, LE for females in Japan has increased even more, creating a new divergence between Japan and the rest of the low mortality countries. In 2007, female LE at age 65 reached 19.1 years in Denmark, 20.2 years in the USA, 22.5 years in France and 23.6 years in Japan.
This presentation will demonstrate how these gaps in LE at age 65 or in old age mortality explain the significant variation observed among low mortality countries when studying the main longevity characteristics of their populations: adult modal age at death or dispersion of adult life durations around it, the occurrence of compression of mortality or, conversely, of shifting mortality, and the rate of increase in the very old: nonagenarians, centenarians and supercentenarians.