Mortality Comparisons 'At a Glance': A Mortality Concentration Curve and Decomposition Analysis for India

Area of Science:

• Demography
• Public Health
• Health Economics

Background:

• Mortality analysis is crucial for understanding population health and socioeconomic factors.
• Existing methods may not fully capture the impact of age distribution on mortality rates.
• The Mortality Concentration Curve (M-Curve) offers a novel approach to visualize and analyze mortality patterns.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce and apply the Mortality Concentration Curve (M-Curve) for examining mortality experience in India.
• To assess mortality trends over time, and variations across regions and genders.
• To demonstrate how the M-Curve can disentangle the effects of population age distribution and age-specific mortality rates.

Main Methods:

• Utilizing the Mortality Concentration Curve (M-Curve) which plots cumulative deaths against cumulative population proportion by age.
• Incorporating value judgments regarding aversion to early deaths for welfare-loss comparisons.
• Performing empirical comparisons across time, regions, genders, and with data from the UK and New Zealand.

Main Results:

• The M-Curve effectively visualizes mortality patterns in India.
• Empirical analysis reveals temporal, regional, and gender-based differences in mortality.
• The M-Curve methodology successfully separates contributions from age distribution and age-specific mortality rates.

Conclusions:

• The M-Curve is a valuable tool for comprehensive mortality analysis.
• It facilitates welfare-loss comparisons by integrating societal values.
• This method enhances understanding of the drivers of mortality changes and differences.