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The aim of this master thesis is to analyze the influence of non-health factors on quality of life in member countries of the European Union. For the analysis, economic and developmental variables were used. The master thesis begins with analysis of life expectancy in the world due to quality of life directly affecting life expectancy. The next part is devoted to the analysis of the influence of GDP on quality of life and correlation between single dimensions of the Human Development Index. The Health index, Inequality-adjusted income index, Expenditure on public health and GNI per capita PPP were analyzed in order to illustrate their influence and importance in provision of quality of life. Unemployment of the age group 55+ and out-of-pocket spending were analyzed to demonstrate their influence on quality of life and life expectancy. Pension systems and retirement age were analyzed with connection to ageing of the population and fiscal problems arising from decreased fertility. Gender inequality is analyzed, drawing adverse consequences of a more equitable, but not a long-term oriented society. As a result of this master thesis, the conclusion was drawn in form of a Quality of life dilemma diagram. The diagram consists of all the variables analyzed in the master thesis displaying positive, negative and likely positive relationships between variables and quality of life. In the conclusion, the problem of sustainability of public finances, welfare state and competitiveness caused by longevity and low fertility affecting future quality of life in the European countries is summed up. The finding of this thesis is that quality of life is a very complex issue and in order to achieve a sustainable quality of life, all the variables have to be wisely governed. Short-term unbalanced improvements in quality of life will very likely retaliate in terms of deterioration of other variables in the future, pulling quality of life down.

It is the purpose of this research to study the effect of temperature on the life cycle of D. nebulosa. D. nebulosa is considered a stenothermal species from a warm environment and has been reported in Texas and Florida, the West Indies, Mexico, Central America, and as far south as Brazil. According to the hypothesis of Hunter (1964), the capacity of this species for adaptation to different temperatures would not be expected to be as great as that of a eurythermal species. Stenothermal species are relatively limited by the environmental temperature, and therefore, one would expect a marked decrease in the length of the life cycle with increasing temperatures. On the other hand, eurythermal species are relatively independent of the environmental temperature, soa relatively less decrease in the length of the life cycle with increasing temperature would be expected.

Yes / In AD 1836, the General Register Office (GRO) was established to oversee the national system of civil registration in England and Wales, recording all births, deaths and marriages. Additional data regarding population size, division size and patterns of occupation within each division permit urban and rural areas (and those with both urban and rural characteristics, described here as ‘mixed’) to be directly compared to each other. The annual Reports of the Registrar General summarize the collected data, including cause of and age at death, which is of particular value to historical demographers and bioarcheologists, allowing us to investigate demographic patterns in urban and rural districts in the nineteenth century. Overall, this paper aims to highlight how this documentary evidence can supplement osteological and paleopathological data to investigate how urbanization affected the health of past populations. It examines the data contained within the first Registrar General report (for 1837-8), in order to assess patterns of mortality of diverse rural, urban, and mixed populations within England and Wales at a point in time during a period of rapid urbanization. It shows that urban and mixed districts typically had lower life expectancy and different patterns in cause of death compared to rural areas. The paper briefly compares how the documentary data differs from information regarding health from skeletal populations, focusing on the city of London, highlighting that certain age groups (the very young and very old) are typically underrepresented in archeological assemblages and reminding us that, while the paleopathological record offers much in terms of chronic health, evidence of acute disease and importantly cause of death can rarely be ascertained from skeletal remains. / This research was funded by the Royal Society of London (Grant Reference IES\R1\180138) and supported by the University of Bradford and SUNY Plattsburgh.

Essay 1 (with Juha Alho and Edward Palmer):  All around the world, public pension schemes are moving in the direction of non-financial (NDC) and financial defined contribution (DC) schemes.  Both rely on accurate projections of life expectancy in the creation of annuities. Accurate projections are critical for system stability, individual utility and inter-generational welfare. This paper suggests a path-breaking innovation that changes the perspective from the Lee-carter (LC) family of trend models which assume a constant rate of change in mortality over time. Our approach is to project the cohort life expectancy on basis of the specific cohort rate of change in mortality. This relaxes the strong trend assumption underlying the LC model, which is the reason why LC model does not work well in the phase of accelerating or decelerating mortality. We use unisex mortality data for $8$ countries to test the performance of our approach both ex-post and ex-ante. The ex-post experiment shows that our approach generally performs better when the rate of change in mortality is accelerating and performs as well as LC model when the rate of change is time-invariant. The ex-ante experiment, on the other hand, shows that our model almost always delivers higher projection of remaining life expectancy than the LC model for the more recent cohorts, which is consistent with the ex-post experimental results. / Essay 2:  Due to the systematic underestimation of cohort life expectancy, NDC pension schemes face a financial risk that can leads to inter-generational unfairness, given the current practice. This paper proposes an alternative method of computing annuity to address this problem. The proposal is to adjust the annuity based on re-estimations of the remaining life expectancy at intervals after retirement, but only up to a ceiling age. The scheme is assessed using 208 cohort annuity pools from eight sample countries. This experiment shows that the proposed scheme succeeds in reducing the inter-generational unfairness for 60-80% of the cohort annuity pools, compared to current practice of fixing the annuity at age 65. Because the adjustment is borne by the relatively large group of younger persons, the per capita change in utility is rather small assuming risk neutrality. / Essay 3:  This paper studies how the incentive to retire in a DC (NDC) scheme is influenced by engaging private information on life expectancy. This is an important question since the decisions made under the two scenarios, optimizing using the private life expectancy or the cohort average made available by the pension provider, create different welfare and financial outcomes. The analytical framework is a standard life-cycle model, accounting for monetary gain from work and non-monetary gain from leisure. The unique feature here is that the individual life expectancy is an explicit driver of disutility of work. The theoretical result is that prevailing private information of a longer-than-average life expectancy can lead to both advancing and delaying retirement, depending on other factors determining utility. The numerical example using Swedish data proves the theoretical results and suggests a rather small average impact on the choice of retirement by engaging private information of life expectancy. / Essay 4:   Pensions in the increasingly popular Notional Defined Contribution (NDC) Pay-as-You-Go Schemes are granted based on cohort-specific life expectancy, regardless socioeconomic differences. This risks perverse intra-generational and unintended inter-generational transfers. This paper introduces an alternative with separate annuity pools for different socioeconomic classes. Using unique Swedish data and the Swedish NDC pension system as an example, the analysis shows a significant gap in life expectancy between socioeconomic classes defined by occupation. In the Swedish context, this implies a perverse transfer of 5% of the pension capital from the manual workers to the non-manual workers, which can be abolished by using the group plan. In addition, the group plan also lessens the risk of inter-generational transfers resulting from the gap in life expectancy.

人口預期壽命的變化一直以來皆被視為是人類發展與進步的指標之一，其成長更為人們所樂見。當人類預期壽命普遍成長且達一定壽命水準時，兩性存活年數的差距仍為一常見的現象。假設社會的發展與變遷對同一社會中的兩性人口造成相異的衝擊，此種差異性會進一步透過兩者間壽命差距的狀況加以反映時，在追求兩性平等與均衡發展此社會目標之驅動下，對兩性壽命水準差距狀況的瞭解乃為提升兩性存活狀況、創造均衡之兩性社會並進而採取相關策略前重要的一步。 本研究利用內政府統計處所編列之台灣地區簡易生命表做為主要的分析資料，從透過對台灣地區兩性壽命差距於國民政府遷台後之1950起至2004年此55年間變化之關注做為出發點，發現兩性壽命於55年間其增長變化上雖然呈現相似的變動狀態，然而女性於各時期內優於男性之成長幅度則是造成日趨擴大之兩性壽命差距之由來。又兩性出生時平均餘命其變動上所呈現的階段性則與兩性壽命差距水準變化上所出現的四階段有其關聯性。此外，兩性於各年齡別平均餘命之增長，大致來說，主要發生在10-60歲組中，70歲以後之較高年齡組中，兩性存活餘命的成長則較不顯著，且兩性餘命差距隨著年齡別的增加而減少。兩性於各年齡別上餘命之差距，在研究觀察的55年間呈現穩定，只是，1960年以前兩性出生時平均餘命與其他較高年齡組上之平均餘命間呈現較為特殊的型態，此乃說明造成兩性壽命差距之年齡別死亡率有異。 本研究將Arriaga(1984)所提，用以分解兩相異之平均餘命，而以不同年齡別中兩性死亡率差異分別對兩性預期壽命差距所作之貢獻加以表示時，發現，兩性在40-79歲間死亡率的差異是造成兩性壽命差距最主要的貢獻年齡別，其中以60-69歲組為最。此外，面對0-9歲組中兩性死亡率差異狀況對該時期兩性預期壽命差距之貢獻型態於1960年前後所呈現之相異性時，一方面有對該時期兩性死亡率之資料加以檢定之必要性外，其所可能象徵之女性生存狀況受其地位改善之影響，抑或為男性存活狀況變化等推測的驗證雖不在本研究所觸及之範圍內，然而透過本研究分析結果中所掌握造成兩性壽命差距之年齡組別，則有助於日後在企圖釐清造成兩性壽命差距之因以進一步改善兩性存活狀況時一切入點。 / Life Expectancy of human beings, one of the indices of human development, has been generally growing since the beginning of the 20th century and the increase in the life span of human is also taken as the result of the improved medical techniques and social conditions. In the face of the growth in life expectancy at birth both of the male and female populations in Taiwan during the past 55 years, 1950-2004, the gender differential of life expectancy at birth or at any other specific age still exited and even got expanding. The difference in life expectancy at birth between the male and the female was 2.64 years and in the year of 2004, it came to be 6.24 years. Suppose the growth of human life expectancy at birth or at any specific age in both female and male populations implies that social changes and developments brought positive impacts not only on the female but also on the male during the observation period of 55 years. Obviously, the existing and expanding gender differences in life expectancy somewhat indicates that the impact of the social changes and developments on the male and the female weren’t comparable in qualities. The main concern of this article is about the change of the differences in life expectancy at birth between the male and the female in Taiwan during the past 55 years, 1950-2004. Dismissing the discussion and investigation of the practical and real causes of the gender difference in life expectancy, the researcher intended to give the reason to the expanding gender difference in life expectancy by comparing the way male and female life expectancies evolved. In addition, adopting the decomposition method developed by Arriaga(1984) originally for decomposition of changes in expectation of life at birth, the researcher was using this method to decompose the gender differential in life expectancy at birth and evaluated the contribution of the gender differential in mortality within each specific age group to the ultimate differential in life expectancy at birth between the male and the female each year during the observation period and the shifts in the significance of these age groups in the past 55 years. In this article, the researcher separated a person’s life into several age groups,0-9,10-19,20-29,30-39,40-49,50-59,60-69,70-79 and 80 above, to symbolize the different stage of a person’s life. The male and the female experienced similar pattern in the changes of life expectancy. However, the improvement of female life expectancy was greater than that of the male’s in any specific period of the past 55 years , which caused the increasing difference in life expectancy between the male and female in Taiwan. The higher the age is, the less the gender difference in life expectancy at that specific age is. As the male is able to live long enough to a higher age, they are more likely to overcome the survival predominance of the female and the gender difference in life expectancy at a specific age would diminish. In addition, as for the contributions made by each specific age group, during the observation period of 55 years, gender differential life expectancy at birth had been coming from the gender differential in death rates within 40 to 80 years old. The contribution made by the age group of 60-69 made had been the most significant one. Mostly, the living ability of the female was much more superior to that of the male at any specific age even if the significance, each age groups held, somewhat had been shifting during the 55 years. Noticeably, the type of the contribution, age group of 0-9 made, was very different after 1960. Before 1960, men demonstrated a better survival ability than women did within this age group; however, after 1960, the superiority of men came into disappearance. As for the change of the contribution this age group of 0-9 made, we need to have more information and data to gain the further ideas it might bring about.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Miami University, Dept. of Sociology and Gerontology, 2009. / Title from second page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 143-156).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Miami University, Dept. of Sociology and Gerontology, 2009. / Title from second page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 143-156).

Changes in mortality behavior in 1950s-1970s pose a fluctuation of Czech population's mortality trend and still have an impact on current level of life expectancy. The thesis focuses on mortality process in that period from cross-sectional and longitudinal approach and tries to identify how the mortality changes affected age intervals older than 30 and influenced cohorts which were in these age intervals in observed period. In the thesis Arriaga's decomposition method was used for quantification of mortality changes in particular age intervals and their affect on changes of life expectancy. The obtained results show that mostly age groups older than 60 were more sensitive to mortality fluctuations.

The purpose of this thesis is to introduce theoretical and analytical approaches to mortality convergence and divergence tendencies and assessment of these tendencies in the European area since late 1950s using selected analytical tools. In the considered period fundamental changes in mortality development in Europe were observed. The theoretical part of this study deals with the assumptions of mortality convergence and divergence which are included in significant demographic theories and concepts. In the practical part of this thesis, there are analyzed convergence and divergence tendencies of life expectancy at birth in 28 European countries between the years 1959 and 2009 using selected basic statistical characteristics of variability as well as of indicators that consider state population size. Divergence tendencies of mortality since the 1970s are documented and quantified, the specific development of convergence and divergence from the mortality point of view in post-communist states at the end of the 20th century is observed. Next, possibilities of future convergence of mortality in the Czech Republic to states with more favorable initial mortality conditions on the basis of the development of life expectancy at the exact age of 65 in the period 1990-2009 are evaluated. According to this approach,...