IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/dem/wpaper/wp-2003-031.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

German unification and the plasticity of mortality at older ages

Author

Listed:
  • Rembrandt D. Scholz

    (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany)

  • Heiner Maier

    (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany)

Abstract

German unification can be seen as a natural experiment that allows us to study the health effects of political and economic transition. This study examined old-age survival following German unification in cohorts born in 1895, 1900, 1905 and 1910. People born in these years were in their 80s and 90s at the time of unification in 1990. Before unification, mortality in these cohorts was considerably higher in East Germany than in the West. Following unification, mortality in the East declined toward prevailing levels in the West, particularly among women. This indicates that even the very-old East Germans were able to profit from the medical, social, and economic improvements associated with unification. Study results support the view that old-age mortality is plastic and amenable to intervention, and they attest to the importance of late-life events.

Suggested Citation

  • Rembrandt D. Scholz & Heiner Maier, 2003. "German unification and the plasticity of mortality at older ages," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2003-031, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:dem:wpaper:wp-2003-031
    DOI: 10.4054/MPIDR-WP-2003-031
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.demogr.mpg.de/papers/working/wp-2003-031.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.4054/MPIDR-WP-2003-031?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. A. Roger Thatcher & Väinö Kannisto & Kirill F. Andreev, 2002. "The Survivor Ratio Method for Estimating Numbers at High Ages," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 6(1), pages 1-18.
    2. Shripad Tuljapurkar & Nan Li & Carl Boe, 2000. "A universal pattern of mortality decline in the G7 countries," Nature, Nature, vol. 405(6788), pages 789-792, June.
    3. Arjan Gjonca & Hilke Brockmann & Heiner Maier, 2000. "Old-Age Mortality in Germany prior to and after Reunification," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 3(1).
    4. James Vaupel & Kenneth Manton & Eric Stallard, 1979. "The impact of heterogeneity in individual frailty on the dynamics of mortality," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 16(3), pages 439-454, August.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Roland Rau & Eugeny Soroko & Domantas Jasilionis & James W. Vaupel, 2008. "Continued Reductions in Mortality at Advanced Ages," Population and Development Review, The Population Council, Inc., vol. 34(4), pages 747-768, December.
    2. Maxim S. Finkelstein, 2003. "Modeling failure (mortality) rate with a change point," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2003-041, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    3. Denise Howel & Suzanne Moffatt & Catherine Haighton & Andrew Bryant & Frauke Becker & Melanie Steer & Sarah Lawson & Terry Aspray & Eugene M G Milne & Luke Vale & Elaine McColl & Martin White, 2019. "Does domiciliary welfare rights advice improve health-related quality of life in independent-living, socio-economically disadvantaged people aged ≥60 years? Randomised controlled trial, economic and p," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(1), pages 1-31, January.
    4. Nicola Fuchs-Schuendeln, 2005. "Adjustment to a Large Shock - Do Households Smooth Low Frequency Consumption?," 2005 Meeting Papers 517, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    5. Maxim S. Finkelstein, 2003. "Age correspondence for different mortality regimes with and without the change point," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2003-039, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    6. Roland Rau & Eugeny L. Soroko & Domantas Jasilionis & James W. Vaupel, 2006. "10 years after Kannisto: further evidence for mortality decline at advanced ages in developed countries," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2006-033, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Vogt, Tobias C. & Kluge, Fanny A., 2015. "Can public spending reduce mortality disparities? Findings from East Germany after reunification," The Journal of the Economics of Ageing, Elsevier, vol. 5(C), pages 7-13.
    2. Basellini, Ugofilippo & Camarda, Carlo Giovanni & Booth, Heather, 2023. "Thirty years on: A review of the Lee–Carter method for forecasting mortality," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 39(3), pages 1033-1049.
    3. Missov, Trifon I. & Lenart, Adam, 2013. "Gompertz–Makeham life expectancies: Expressions and applications," Theoretical Population Biology, Elsevier, vol. 90(C), pages 29-35.
    4. Shripad Tuljapurkar & Ryan Edwards, 2011. "Variance in death and its implications for modeling and forecasting mortality," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 24(21), pages 497-526.
    5. Missov, Trifon I. & Finkelstein, Maxim, 2011. "Admissible mixing distributions for a general class of mixture survival models with known asymptotics," Theoretical Population Biology, Elsevier, vol. 80(1), pages 64-70.
    6. Basellini, Ugofilippo & Camarda, Carlo Giovanni & Booth, Heather, 2022. "Thirty years on: A review of the Lee-Carter method for forecasting mortality," SocArXiv 8u34d, Center for Open Science.
    7. Dennis M. Feehan, 2018. "Separating the Signal From the Noise: Evidence for Deceleration in Old-Age Death Rates," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 55(6), pages 2025-2044, December.
    8. Booth, Heather, 2006. "Demographic forecasting: 1980 to 2005 in review," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 22(3), pages 547-581.
    9. Bagdonavicius, Vilijandas & Nikulin, Mikhail, 2000. "On goodness-of-fit for the linear transformation and frailty models," Statistics & Probability Letters, Elsevier, vol. 47(2), pages 177-188, April.
    10. Yahia Salhi & Pierre-Emmanuel Thérond, 2016. "Age-Specific Adjustment of Graduated Mortality," Working Papers hal-01391285, HAL.
    11. Feehan, Dennis & Wrigley-Field, Elizabeth, 2020. "How do populations aggregate?," SocArXiv 2fkw3, Center for Open Science.
    12. M. K. Lintu & Asha Kamath, 2022. "Performance of recurrent event models on defect proneness data," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 315(2), pages 2209-2218, August.
    13. Il Do Ha & Maengseok Noh & Youngjo Lee, 2010. "Bias Reduction of Likelihood Estimators in Semiparametric Frailty Models," Scandinavian Journal of Statistics, Danish Society for Theoretical Statistics;Finnish Statistical Society;Norwegian Statistical Association;Swedish Statistical Association, vol. 37(2), pages 307-320, June.
    14. Andreas Wienke & Anne M. Herskind & Kaare Christensen & Axel Skytthe & Anatoli I. Yashin, 2002. "The influence of smoking and BMI on heritability in susceptibility to coronary heart disease," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2002-003, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    15. Svetlana V. Ukraintseva & Anatoli I. Yashin, 2005. "Economic progress as cancer risk factor. I: Puzzling facts of cancer epidemiology," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2005-021, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    16. Geert Zittersteyn & Jennifer Alonso-García, 2021. "Common Factor Cause-Specific Mortality Model," Risks, MDPI, vol. 9(12), pages 1-30, December.
    17. Silke van Daalen & Hal Caswell, 2015. "Lifetime reproduction and the second demographic transition: Stochasticity and individual variation," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 33(20), pages 561-588.
    18. Duncan Gillespie & Meredith Trotter & Shripad Tuljapurkar, 2014. "Divergence in Age Patterns of Mortality Change Drives International Divergence in Lifespan Inequality," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 51(3), pages 1003-1017, June.
    19. K. Motarjem & M. Mohammadzadeh & A. Abyar, 2020. "Geostatistical survival model with Gaussian random effect," Statistical Papers, Springer, vol. 61(1), pages 85-107, February.
    20. Frank T. Denton & Byron G. Spencer, 2011. "A Dynamic Extension of the Period Life Table," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 24(34), pages 831-854.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Germany;

    JEL classification:

    • J1 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics
    • Z0 - Other Special Topics - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:dem:wpaper:wp-2003-031. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Peter Wilhelm (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.demogr.mpg.de/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.