American Delusion: Life Expectancy and Welfare in the United States from an International Perspective

IF 1.6 3区经济学 Q2 ECONOMICS

Journal of Human Capital Pub Date : 2021-11-03 DOI:10.1086/717543

Rodrigo R. Soares, Rudi Rocha, Michel Szklo

引用次数: 0

Abstract

Recent increases in mortality are at the forefront of the public health debate in the United States. This paper takes a comparative international perspective and documents the poor relative performance of life expectancy in the United States. We characterize its age and cause of death profiles over time and estimate its welfare implications. We show that this poor performance is not recent, not restricted to very particular causes of death, but mostly driven by adults and older ages. We calculate that recent welfare gains could have been 19%–28% higher had the United States been able to reproduce the life expectancy performance of the average member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

查看原文本刊更多论文

美国人的错觉：国际视野下的美国预期寿命与福利

最近死亡率的上升是美国公共卫生辩论的焦点。本文采用国际比较的视角，记录了美国预期寿命的相对较差表现。我们描述了其年龄和死因随时间的变化，并估计了其对福利的影响。我们发现，这种糟糕的表现并不是最近才出现的，并不局限于非常特殊的死亡原因，而是主要由成年人和老年人引起的。我们计算出，如果美国能够重现经济合作与发展组织平均成员国的预期寿命表现，最近的福利增长可能会高出19%-28%。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

求助全文

约1分钟内获得全文求助全文

来源期刊

Journal of Human Capital ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

2.30

自引率

0.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： Journal of Human Capital is dedicated to human capital and its expanding economic and social roles in the knowledge economy. Developed in response to the central role human capital plays in determining the production, allocation, and distribution of economic resources and in supporting long-term economic growth, JHC is a forum for theoretical and empirical work on human capital—broadly defined to include education, health, entrepreneurship, and intellectual and social capital—and related public policy analyses. JHC encompasses microeconomic, macroeconomic, and international economic perspectives on the theme of human capital. The journal offers a platform for discussion of topics ranging from education, labor, health, and family economics.