DEVELOPING A SYSTEM OF MODEL LIFE TABLES FOR ETHIOPIA TO IMPROVE MORTALITY ANALYSIS: A BRASS’ LOGIT APPROACH

Abstract

Ethiopia does not a have a functional vital registration system for its mortality analysis and the model life tables that exist today have been criticized for not capturing mortality experiences of the country because they did not include mortality data from the developing world while created. This study, therefore, aims to construct a mortality analysis tool -a system of model life tables - that addresses the issue of mortality analysis in Ethiopia using Brass’ logit approach. Infant Mortality Rates (IMRs) and Under - Five Mortality Rates (U5MRs) collected from the Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD) 2019 were combined with survivorship functions derived from Ethiopian empirical life tables from the UN World Population Prospects (WPP) 2022. By averaging thirty years of UN survivorship functions for Ethiopia and its regions, tailored standard survivorship functions were developed. The original lx and the standard lsx survival functions were related via their logit transformations allowing for the computations of age specific mortality rates on the basis of the available data - IMRs and U5MRs. Finally, a complete set of model based abridged life tables was generated by fitting the parametric model to the transformed survival functions. The results indicate that the newly developed system of model life tables produced fairly comparable results to those found in the literature concluding its robustness and applicability. With a 7.7% increase in the likelihood of survival at birth, life expectancy increased by 16.977 years. IMRs and U5MRs decreased by 69.5% and 66% respectively and they differed from 12.88 deaths per 1000 live births in Addis Ababa to 43.94 in Benshangul - Gumuz; and from 28.16 deaths per 1000 live births in Addis Ababa to 77.32 in Benshangul - Gumuz respectively. Even though Ethiopia’s survival rate has improved over the previous three decades, more work is still demanded to lower the persistently high level of mortality, reach the global average life expectancy, and satisfy the Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations to the greatest extent viable.