Drewnowski's index to measure lifespan variation: Revisiting the Gini coefficient of the life table.

José Manuel Aburto ORCID logo; Ugofilippo Basellini; Annette Baudisch; Francisco Villavicencio; (2022) Drewnowski's index to measure lifespan variation: Revisiting the Gini coefficient of the life table. Theoretical population biology, 148. pp. 1-10. ISSN 0040-5809 DOI: 10.1016/j.tpb.2022.08.003
Copy

The Gini coefficient of the life table is a concentration index that provides information on lifespan variation. Originally proposed by economists to measure income and wealth inequalities, it has been widely used in population studies to investigate variation in ages at death. We focus on the complement of the Gini coefficient, Drewnowski's index, which is a measure of equality. We study its mathematical properties and analyze how changes over time relate to changes in life expectancy. Further, we identify the threshold age below which mortality improvements are translated into decreasing lifespan variation and above which these improvements translate into increasing lifespan inequality. We illustrate our theoretical findings simulating scenarios of mortality improvement in the Gompertz model, and showing an example of application to Swedish life table data. Our experiments demonstrate how Drewnowski's index can serve as an indicator of the shape of mortality patterns. These properties, along with our analytical findings, support studying lifespan variation alongside life expectancy trends in multiple species.


picture_as_pdf
Aburto-etal-2022-Drewnowskis-index-to-measure-lifespan-variation.pdf
subject
Published Version
Available under Creative Commons: NC-ND 4.0

View Download

Atom BibTeX OpenURL ContextObject in Span Multiline CSV OpenURL ContextObject Dublin Core Dublin Core MPEG-21 DIDL EndNote HTML Citation JSON MARC (ASCII) MARC (ISO 2709) METS MODS RDF+N3 RDF+N-Triples RDF+XML RIOXX2 XML Reference Manager Refer Simple Metadata ASCII Citation EP3 XML
Export

Downloads