Life Expectancy At Birth

This dataset provides the period Life Expectancy at birth per country and year. The overall aim of the dataset is to cover the entire world from 1500-2000.

This version (version 2) was built as part of the OECD "How was life" project. The dataset has nearly global coverage for the post-1950 period, while pre-1950 coverage decreases the more historic the period. Depending on sources, the data are annual estimates, five-yearly or decadal estimates.

The sources used are:

• UN World Population Project.
• Human Mortality Database.
• Gapminder.
• OECD.
• Montevideo-Oxford Latin America Economic History Database.
• ONS.
• Australian Bureau of Statistics.
• Kannisto, V., Nieminen, M. & Turpeinen, O. (1999). Finnish Life Tables since 1751, Demographic Research, 1(1), DOI: 10.4054/DemRes.1999.1.1

For specifics concerning (selections of) the sources, see the R code available in the working paper here.