27/10/2021

Introduction

Life Expectancy is a statistical measure of the average time an organism is expected to live, based on the year of its birth, its current age, and other demographic factors

In the beginning of the 19th century, life expectancy started to increase in the early industrialized countries while it remained low in the rest of the world. This led to a very high inequality in how health was distributed across the world. However, over the last decades this global inequality has decreased. This can be attributed to a number of factors like improvement in standard of living, development in the medical sector, vaccines to prevent various diseases etc.

Lets take a look at the Life Expectancy in 2015 and the factors affecting it in detail.

Life Expectancy in the Year 2015

By looking at this world map we can get a fair idea about how the Life Expectancy is distributed. The European countries seem to fair quite high on the Life Expectancy scale while the African countries barring a few seem to languish at the bottom. The Life Expectancy in South America and Asia lies somewhere in the middle of the scale from 70 to 75.

The Top 10 Countries with the Highest Life Expectancy

The European countries of Slovenia, Denmark and Cyprus occupy the top 3 spots with Life Expectancy values of 88,86 and 85 years respectively. Out of the top 10, seven belong to Europe, two to Asia and one to South America. 9 out of these 10 countries are all Developed except for Chile, which is still a Developing country.

Infant Deaths and Polio Immunization

Polio is one of the leading causes of deaths among infants but timely vaccination and precautions can prevent this. The following Bubble chart illustrates the same; Countries which have achieved 100% of Polio immunization have 0 or almost negligible infant deaths. However there do exist some anomalies like Nigeria which has 92% vaccination coverage but still many infant deaths, this can be attributed to various other social factors. Among all the countries India has the highest number of infant deaths with 56% vaccination coverage.

Relationship between GDP per capita and Life Expectancy

The GDP per capita is a good indicator of how well a country is doing economically. The below scatter plot animation clearly tells us that the GDP per capita is directly proportional to the Life Expectancy of a country. All the Developed countries with a high GDP per capita have a Life Expectancy of above 70, which is constant through the decade, from 2005-2015.

Relationship of Population and BMI with Life Expectancy

Countries with high population tend to put a burden on their resources leading to the GDP per capita falling down, a mismatch between number of medical resources and the population and so on. All this in turn affects the overall Life expectancy of its residents. The Body Mass Index (BMI) is used to calculate the body fat of a person which helps us to know whether a person is underweight, healthy or obese. People who suffer from obesity tend to have various other complications which reduce their life span.

Conclusion

The Average Life expectancy in 2015 was 71.4 years while in 2005 it was 63.6 years. Thus witnessing a jump of 7.8 years.

After looking at the visualizations we can effectively conclude that the Life Expectancy depends on a number of factors. Countries with high GDP per capita and less population, all had a high Life expectancy. While densely populated countries with low GDP per capita had a low Life expectancy.

The developed countries are placed higher on the Life expectancy scale than the developing countries. This is a sign for the developing countries with life expectancy less than 65 years to invest more resources in healthcare and improve their standard of living.

Immunization is also an effective way to reduce mortality and improve life expectancy, especially among children.

A Happy Future

Today most people in the world can expect to live a long and healthy life, thanks to the innovation in different sectors. The average Life expectancy is expected to further increase in the coming years and one can only hope it does.

References

The Global Health Observatory, (n.d.), Life expectancy at birth (years), World Health Organization, viewed 10th October, 2021 https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-details/GHO/life-expectancy-at-birth-(years)

United Nations, (n.d.), UN data, A world of information , United Nations Organization, viewed 10th October, 2021. https://data.un.org/

James Baglin, ‘Data Visualization’, lecture notes, Data Visualization and Communication, RMIT University viewed 11th October, 2021. https://dark-star-161610.appspot.com/secured/_book/adding-interactivity.html

Plotly Documentation. (n.d.). Plotly R Open Source Graphing Library. Plotly, viewed 13th October, 2021. https://plotly.com/r/

GGPlot2 Documentation. (n.d.). GGPlot2 Cheatsheet. Tidyverse, viewed 13th October, 2021. https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org/

The R Graph Gallery. (n.d.), R Graph Gallery Chart types, viewed 14th October, 2021. https://www.r-graph-gallery.com/index.html