Correlates of life expectancy in less developed countries

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 1960-65 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 1970-75 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.