Project 1: Data Visualization

Economic Crisis impact in the Life Expectancy of people in Greece.

The financial crisis has changed many things on many countries the last years. Generally economic status is known to have a significant impact on many sectors of a country, and can change the every day life of many people. Here we will try to find out if economic crisis had any effect on the Life expectancy of people in Greece, and how it has changed it over the years (2007-2017).

Life Expectancy in Greece

First of all lets find out how the life expectancy changed in Greece over the years.

As we can see in Greece generally we have an increasing Life Expectancy over the years but with some very clear drops. The drop in 2007 may be unrelated to the economic crisis, as the economy of Greece didn’t have any clear problems around that time. Specifically for the years after the economic crisis breakout (2008-now) we can see drops in the years 2012 and 2015. From the first point of view these points are related to the crisis, specifically in 2012 Greece was included in the Second Economic adjustment Program, recession worsened and GDP experienced a 7.1% decline. Moreover, 2015 was an important year for Greece with capital controls and the inclusion in the Third Economic Adjustment Program which further decreased the GDP by 6%.

Does the drop occur on a specific sex?

Beside the fact that females on average have highest life expectancy than males, in the above chart we can also see that on 2012 life expectancy for women dropped by 0.1 years while for males it remained the same, beside that, the there is no significant difference in life expectancy between sex that could be related with the total drop.

Or any specific age group?

Furthermore, besides the life expectancy in infants by sex, it is necessary to have a view of the life expectancy changes in regards to the age group. The age groups that we are going to check are

• 0-10
• 10-20
• 20-30
• 30-40
• 40-50
• 50-60
• 60-70
• 70-80
• 80+

In this chart, we can see that the life expectancy in Greece increases in general for all age groups. While the rate of increase has declined over the years, it can be explained by more factors than the economic crisis, one example is that its harder to keep up the same rate when life expectancy gets higher and higher. Moreover, its the same for all age groups so we cannot deduct that crisis has played a decisive role in the decrease of the rate for any specific age group.

Furthermore, we can’t conclude about the importance of economic crisis in life expectancy without previously comparing the data with other countries of European Union, and contradict it with countries that are known to not have serious economic problems during (2009-2010).

Europe vs Greece

While in general Greece is above the European average on all years. We can definitely see that in 2012 life expectancy in the European Union generally increased, but in Greece, life expectancy declined by 0.3 years. Because of the importance of this year in the economic status of Greece, this can be definitely attributed to economic problems. We can also see that on 2015 another drop happened but it escalated to the whole Europe, Again at this year Greece had many economical problems but this drop happened for many other countries.

Europe vs Greece separately

But can we find trends with specific countries?

In the above chart, we can see how the life expectancy rose in European countries along with their average life expectancy during the 2007-2017. Greece had the 10th lowest growth rate of 1.7 years and the average was 80.9 years for a newborn. While this may seem problematic, we can see other countries that did not fully experienced the effects of the crisis like Sweden and Germany that had lower growth. So to the best of our knowledge, it is not conclusive that the economic crisis had an effect on the life expectancy of Greece till now.

European Countries

Moving forward its mandatory to see the timeline of life expectancy in European countries in depth to find any correlation.

When checking the life expectancy for all European countries we can see again Greece is on the top chart in Europe in regards to life expectancy with an average of 80.8 years. Moreover, matches the timeline of other countries that belong to the top 10 of the chart.

While on our previous analysis we can see a drop in life expectancy in the years 2012 and 2015, by comparing it with other European countries that were among the top 10 we cannot attribute this drop to economic crisis as we can see that many other countries had the same drop.

What is more interesting is that by investigating on a subset of Europe we can see that European countries that had financial issues like Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain clearly match with Sweden, Germany and France.

or if we check specifically for the years of 2012 and 2015 where Greece had drops in Life Expectancy

Lets focus on some of European countries

Below we can see how life expectancy changed for a subset of Europe at the interesting years of 2012 and 2015.

Obviously we can see that in the years 2012 and 2015 all of these countries had decreasing life expectancies. During the years of economic recession, we know that Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain were hit more in Europe. While France and Germany were among the strongest, Sweden and Switzerland, on the other hand, are known for their social and economic policies, and during those years they didn’t have any economic issues. We should observe on the above plot that on 2012 the European union expectancy increased by 0.1 years while on the 4 countries it dropped by 0.1, Germany on the other followed EU while Sweden and Switzerland had no changes. Moreover, on 2015 all of the countries had huge drops while Portugal remained unchanged. Furthermore, to support the fact the crisis had much effect not only on the life expectancy of Greece but the whole of Europe is that in 2015 Germany and France had higher drops than Greece.

Did life expectancy drop only on Greece?

The data makes no mistakes here, we can definitely see drops on the life expectancy for Greece as we can see in many European countries. Maybe 2012 is not the most important year here, but definitely 2015 is related to economic crisis, just after the vote that citizens of Greece put against Troika, which fired back and resulted in capital controls and increased austerity measures, that had consequences on many sectors. We can also conclude that the effects of the economic crisis had detrimental effects on the whole of Europe, as even the countries that were stronger economically had significant drops. Moreover, there was not a widespread disease or something else of that kind that would have the same effects.

Which countries had the most serious issues?

We can also verify the above in the maps below.

In the above maps, we can see how life expectancy changed in the whole Europe. From 2011-2012 we can see that it decreased for many countries by a small factor, while in 2015 we can see that the drop was higher and that the top countries regarding GDP had the highest drops like France and Germany, while Greece and Spain reductions where lower.

More and more we come to find that crisis did not only have an effect on the life expectancy of Greece, but the drop escalated in the whole Europe around 2012 for all developed countries and 2015 was the years with the highest drop.

So did crisis had an effect on the life expectancy?

Definitely yes it had, maybe not directly but if we dig deeper we will find more clues. Lets see the timeline below.

The stats show that in the years 2012 to 2015 the unemployment increased to 25% with lower and lower health expenditure for Greece, which is strongly related to the life expectancy of the people in a country. In the long-term, austerity in health care may lead to mortality increase and that is what happened in Greece during the economic crisis. Of course, lower expenditure for health care do not have immediate effect, and that is the reason we haven’t seen the big drop earlier than 2015. We can conclude though that Greece paid the heavy toll of economic crisis and by seeing that unemployment drops steadily the last years, everything will become normal again.

Extra Datasets taken from [OECD]: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, https://stats.oecd.org/