Life expectancy is the number of years that a person can expect to live on average in a given population. It is a commonly used summary measure based on death rates of the population in a given year. Life expectancy is usually reported as life expectancy at birth although other base years are also used. Remaining life expectancies at ages 1, 15, 45 and 65 are also often used to reflect how life expectancy changes over a lifetime. For example, at birth, an individual may have a life expectancy of 75 years, but at the age of 75 she or he might expect to live for another 10 years. This section gives particular attention to the EU populations, taking differences and their possible causes into account.
Different organisations (e.g. WHO, OECD and the statistical office of the European Communities Eurostat) use slightly different approaches to estimating life expectancy, which explains why indicators of life expectancy may differ between different databases.
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Literature and data sources
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