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.