Convergent Mortality Levels: Coherent Mortality Forecasts among Industrialized Countries

Marie-Pier Bergeron Boucher, Max Planck Odense Center
Vladimir Canudas-Romo, Max Planck Odense Center
James W. Vaupel, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and Max Planck Odense Center

Convergence of mortality levels across industrialized countries is observed since the middle of the XXth century. Considering this convergence, forecasting mortality by single-country becomes less proper and a forecasting component common for all countries is necessary. We compare existing forecasting models, and adapt new models, that include common regional trends and asses which model best describes the past and future pattern of mortality in industrialized countries. The forecasting proposal by Li and Lee model and the Compositional Data Analysis (CoDa) approach introduced by Oeppen in the context of forecasting causes of death are compared and combined. Although these two methods have the same goal, their approaches tap different aspect of the “coherent forecasting” problem and we make the hypothesis that a combination of the two might be the optimal methodology.