Correlates of life expectancy in less developed countries

Abstract

Analyses were performed to investigate several hypotheses concerning the multiple determinants of levels of life expectancy in developing countries in recent decades and some possible explanation for the observed variations in amount of gain in life expectancy from the 1950's to the 1970's. The findings were significant. For level of life expectancy the results of this present work conform by and large to results of other scholars in this area, although the present work is unique in that only developing countries were included. From the 1960's to the 1970's there has been a shift in the relative importance of economic indicators and general social indicators in favor of the social indicators. In the period 1960–1965 some 70% of the variation in levels of life expectancy was associated with per capita income and literacy rates in a ratio of about three to two in favor of the economic variable. By 1970–1975 the ratio has become six to one in favor of literacy. In addition, the multivariate model showed that the sanitation variables began to appear as significant correlates of levels of life expectancy in the more recent time period, playing a larger role than level of income per capita. Work pursued as part of a separate but concurrent project explored explicitly this three-way interaction between literacy, life expectancy and sanitation.

For change in life expectancy from 1950 through 1970, associations were quite different. Per capita income was not associated with the absolute change in life expectancy, and the associations with literacy were much smaller than earlier observed with level of life expectancy at a point in time. In the multivariate model the primary correlates with change were the sanitation variables and health personnel as represented by population per midwife. Tests for such associations with variations in amount of gain in life expectancy have not been found in other literature and comparison with other findings can therefore not be made directly. The present work suggests that it may be lower skill levels of health manpower and activities in sanitation that are the main correlates in a multivariate model of absolute change in life expectancy.