Remarks

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.

Mortality rates by age have been recalculated by Eurostat to the same definition, the age reached during the year of the event. This permits rates to be recombined by generation. For further information on the methodology used by Eurostat see Calot & Sardon, 2004. The same applies for the calculation of life expectancies by sex and age.

Different organisations (e.g. WHO, Eurostat and OECD) use slightly different approaches to estimating life expectancy, which explains why indicators of life expectancy may differ between different databases.