Coherent Mortality Forecasting for Less Developed Countries

Hong Li (), Yang Lu and Pintao Lyu
Additional contact information
Yang Lu: Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Concordia University, Montreal, QC H3G 1M8, Canada
Pintao Lyu: Department of Econometrics and OR, Tilburg University, 2591 TV The Hague, The Netherlands

Risks, 2021, vol. 9, issue 9, 1-21

Abstract: This paper proposes a coherent multi-population approach to mortality forecasting for less developed countries. The majority of these countries have witnessed faster mortality declines among the young and the working age populations during the past few decades, whereas in the more developed countries, the contemporary mortality declines have been more substantial among the elders. Along with the socioeconomic developments, the mortality patterns of the less developed countries may become closer to those of the more developed countries. As a consequence, forecasting the long-term mortality of a less developed country by simply extrapolating its historical patterns might lead to implausible results. As an alternative, this paper proposes to incorporate the mortality patterns of a group of more developed countries as the benchmark to improve the forecast for a less developed one. With long-term, between-country coherence in mind, we allow the less developed country’s age-specific mortality improvement rates to gradually converge with those of the benchmark countries during the projection phase. Further, we employ a data-driven, threshold hitting approach to control the speed of this convergence. Our method is applied to China, Brazil, and Nigeria. We conclude that taking into account the gradual convergence of mortality patterns can lead to more reasonable long-term forecasts for less developed countries.

Keywords: coherent mortality forecasts; less developed countries; mortality rotation; double logistic function (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C G0 G1 G2 G3 K2 M2 M4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9091/9/9/151/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9091/9/9/151/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jrisks:v:9:y:2021:i:9:p:151-:d:620762

Access Statistics for this article

Risks is currently edited by Mr. Claude Zhang

More articles in Risks from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().