Mortality has improved tremendously over the last fifty years in most developed
countries. The extent of the improvements for the age interval 60-64 for men is shown in
Figure 2-1, which graphs the death rates through time for our twelve countries. On
average, mortality across these countries dropped by more than half over the fifty years
from 1957 to 2007. Mortality in Denmark dropped the least, from 0.020 to 0.013;
mortality in Japan dropped the most from 0.029 to 0.010. Although identifying individual
countries in the figure is a bit difficult we include all countries in the same figure
because we want to show the dispersion across countries. In 1957, the standard
deviation for the death rate across the twelve countries was 0.0039, but by 2007 this
had fallen by two-thirds to 0.0013. Moreover, the gains show a degree of convergence
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across countries. For example, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden that had the
lowest death rates in 1957 exhibiting the smallest gains between 1957 and 2007.4