title: Avoidable mortality risks and measurement of wellbeing and inequality.
abstract: This paper proposes a data envelopment method to separate avoidable and unavoidable mortality risks. As unavoidable mortality is either beyond the control of humanity or likely to be very cost-ineffective to reduce in the short to medium term, avoidable mortality is of much greater practical relevance in measuring wellbeing and inequality. The new method is applied to a dataset consisting of life tables for 191 countries in the year 2000 to obtain a reference distribution of unavoidable mortality risks. The reference distribution is used to improve on the standard age-at-death measure to obtain an age-at-avoidable-death measure. Compared with the standard measure, age-at-avoidable-death provides a very different picture of wellbeing, and more so when it comes to inequality measures.
authors.affiliation: School of Economics, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia. kk.tang@uq.edu.au
authors.forename: Kam Ki
authors.initials: KK
authors.lastname: Tang
authors.forename: Jackie T C
authors.initials: JT
authors.lastname: Chin
authors.forename: D S Prasada
authors.initials: DS
authors.lastname: Rao
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D002980:Climate; D005260:Female; D054624:Health Status Disparities; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008017:Life Expectancy; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D015233:Models, Statistical; D009026:Mortality; D012307:Risk Factors; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors