>I haven't been following this thread so I'm ignorant of how these
>figures are calculated. Do they refer to life expectancy at birth?
>If so, they don't tell us much. Very nearly the whole of the gain
>in life expectancy (in the U.S.) from 1890 to 1950 was in
>decreased infant and child mortality. The life expectancy of
>a 40 year old man in 1890 and 1950 were not much different.
Most development analysts - like the UNDP or UNICEF - foreground the under-5 mortality rate. They're not unaware of this. The slower decline in the U5MR induced by the 1980s debt crisis and depression has been estimated to translate into hundreds of thousands of additional child deaths a year.
Doug