Interpreting and Projecting Mortality Trends for European Countries by Using the LD Model

Assumptions on future mortality play a key role for pension, health care and long-term care policies: the understanding of mortality trends is therefore of paramount importance for projections purposes, especially for the forerunners countries. In general, improvement for adult mortality is understood as declining of the mortality curve. However, Ishii (2008) has showed how adult mortality improvement could be better modelled by the shift-type than by decline-type model, such as the Lee-Carter model (Lee and Carter 1992), and he has proposed the Linear Difference (LD) model. In this study, we apply the LD model to the adult mortality for several European countries to analyse the trends of mortality improvements. Through the comparison of the parameters for the LD model between countries, we try to elucidate the peculiar features of mortality in Europe, to be used for projections purposes. These characteristics will be also compared to those of Japan, a benchmark country in the field of mortality, and the projected trends compared to those from other sources. Given the variety of mortality patterns existing in Europe, this study is also an important test about the performance of the LD model.