摘要
Using data from Population Censuses,1%National Population Sample Surveys of China and the Human Mortality Database,this article adopts robust percentile-based methods to analyze the changing trend of life expectancy of the Chinese elderly especially the young-old and rural-urban disparity from 1989 to 2015,and attempt to explain the disadvantage of old-age mortality improvement in China compared to developed countries.We find that life expectancy at age 65 in China has increased continuously in recent decades,but at a lower speed than in developed countries,leading to a widening gap between China and developed countries,and the increase in e65 has not shown a clear catch-up trend that has been observed in the life expec-tancy at birth.Similar patterns are found when we explore the rural-urban disparity of China.Based on the age-at-death distribution,we find that the old-age deaths in rural areas are more concentrated at relatively younger ages compared to urban areas due to the higher death risks and slower improvement in mortality of the young-old in rural China.Our findings describe the age-patterns underlying the rural-urban disparity in life expectancy of the elderly within China,and also the main reason for the slower improvement of life expectancy among the Chinese elderly compared with those in developed countries.Survival improvement of the young-old and equalization of available health services are key to reducing the rural-urban bias and achieving accelerated increase in life expectancy among the elderly in China.
作者简介
Yuan Peng is a Ph.D.student in the School of Sociology,Huazhong University of Science and Technology.Her research interests include mortality,longevity and population health.pengyuan617@hust.edu.cn;Lin Dong is a Ph.D.student in the School of Sociology,Huazhong University of Science and Technology.Her research interests include fertility,gender imbalance and inequality in mortality.donglin@hust.edu.cn;Haili Liang is a Ph.D.student in the School of Sociology,Huazhong University of Science and Technology.Her research interests include sex imbalance and mortality,education and population projection.lianghelly@163.com;Liuqing Yang is a master student in the School of sociology,Huazhong University of Science and Technology.Her research interests include education,fertility and mortality.liuqing_yang@hust.edu.cn;Sha Jiang is a Ph.D.student in the Department of Biology at Stanford University.Her research interests include old-age mortality,fertility and sex imbalance.jiangsha@stanford.edu;Shripad Tuljapurkar is Professor of Biology and the Dean&Virginia Morrison Professor of Population Studies at Stanford University.His research areas include stochastic dynamics of human and natural populations,life history evolution,especially senescence,prehistoric societies,and probability forecasts including sex ratios,mortality,aging and fiscal balance.tulja@stanford.edu;通讯作者:Zhen Guo is Professor and the Assistant Dean of the School of Sociology,Huazhong University of Science and Technology.He received his Ph.D.from Xi’an Jiaotong University in 2013.He was a Visiting Ph.D.student at Department of Sociology at the University of Victoria in 2011,and a Visiting Associate Professor at the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies at Stanford University in 2015.His research focuses on population development strategy,gender imbalance and fertility in China,as well as the population health and mortality.guozhen@hust.edu.cn。
