Cause-of-Death Mortality: What Can Be Learned From Population Dynamics?

This paper analyses cause-of-death mortality changes and its impacts on the whole population evolution. The study combines cause-of-death analysis and population dynamics techniques. Our aim is to measure the impact of cause-of-death reduction on the whole population age structure, and more specifically on the depdendency ratio which is a crucial quantity for pay-as-you-go pension systems. Whereas previous studies on causes of death focused on mortality indicators such as survival curves or life expectancy, our approach provides additional information by including birth patterns. As an important conclusion, our numerical results based on French data show that populations with identical life expectancies can present important differences in their age pyramid resulting from different cause-specific mortality reductions. Sensitivities to fertility level and population flows are also given.