Abstract: Decelerating gains in life expectancy (e0) in high-income countries have raised concerns about the future of human longevity. To enhance better understanding of these developments, we scrutinize subnational (N=450) mortality trends in Western Europe during the pre-pandemic period. Between 1992 and 2005, e0 gains were both substantial and widespread. The laggard regions experienced the fastest improvements, which led to a rapid regional convergence. However, between 2005 and 2019, e0 gains in these regions decelerated notably. Yet, they remained remarkably stable in vanguard regions, suggesting that extending longevity remains possible. The observed deceleration of e0 gains is strongly associated with mortality of the population aged 55–74, which increased by 2019 across large parts of Western Europe, particularly in Germany and France. We strongly advocate that assessing and further monitoring mortality trends at a fine geographical level are crucial for revealing potentials and challenges for sustainable progress in human longevity.

Abstract: Recent research has shown that geography is an important predictor of life expectancy at birth (e0). However, most papers have focused on place of residence at death (PoR), yet place of birth (PoB) may be a more important predictor of later mortality. To study how different measures of geography matter, we compute the first annual full lifetables by PoB for 90 French regions between 1975 and 2019 and compare them with lifetables by PoR. We show that e0 by PoR and PoB are highly correlated, but they have diverged in recent times, particularly for men, consistent with the growing importance of migration. This divergence has consequences on the trends in geographic disparities of longevity.  First, geographic disparities by PoB have continuously declined, but measured by PoR they have risen since the 1990s. Second, the French geographical income gradient - the association between regional income and e0 - was negative and became positive in the 1990s when measured by PoR. When measured by PoB, the gradient has never been positive: it was negative but is now insignificant. These results are qualitatively similar if we study life expectancy at age 50.

Abstract: This paper analyzes the shares of high-income earners within local populations, leveraging consistent annual income distributions for 90 French regions since 1960. The spatial dispersion of these shares has followed a U-shaped trajectory: a high concentration level in the 1960s, a decline in subsequent decades, and a marked increase since the early 2000s. In the 1960s, high-income earners were over-represented in the largest urban areas and the industrial Northeast. Today, they remain over-represented in the largest urban areas and near Switzerland. We demonstrate that shifts in regional productive structures explain this U-shaped trajectory. Deindustrialization initially reduced regional economic disparities, lowering the concentration of high-income earners. However, the shift to a service-based economy led to a resurgence of spatial concentration, as high-skilled workers increasingly clustered in large cities to benefit from agglomeration economies.

Abstract: Understanding the relationship between life expectancy at birth (e0) and the gross domestic product per capita (GDPpc) is relevant for cohesion policies in the European Union (EU) because it might imply that economic convergence (or divergence) is accompanied by narrowing (or widening) health gaps. Previous studies have studied the association between GDPpc and e0 almost exclusively based on national data. It is certainly more appropriate, however, to study the relationship at the subnational level because levels and trends in both variables, e0 and GDPpc, vary substantially across Europe’s regions. Accordingly, our study aims to examine whether the economic performance of regions predicts their e0 level. We build Preston curves from regression models using regional data for 21 European countries, divided into 506 regions. Mortality data comes from statistical offices and GDPpc can be obtained from the Eurostat database. The period 2008 to 2019 is particularly interesting as it follows the EU enlargement to central-eastern European countries in 2004. In our analysis, spatial units refer to NUTS-2 or NUTS-3 regions, depending on the size of the country. Our results suggest that there is indeed a positive association between GDPpc and e0. Similarly, to Preston’s original analysis, we observe an upward shift in the curve, indicating that factors exogenous to a region’s GDPpc level play an important role in explaining e0 gains as well. Yet, the relationship differs between geographical areas and we also find examples such as women in Germany, Austria, Poland, and the Netherlands where it does not seem to hold.

Abstract: This paper proposes homogeneous annual series on the income distribution of French metropolitan départements for the period 1960-69 and 1986-2018. We rely on unpublished and newly digitised archives of the French Ministry of Finance. They consist of fiscal tabulations that are a summary of households’ income tax declarations. Based on these raw sources, we interpolate the whole income distribution of French metropolitan départements after 1986. Before 1986, we need more assumptions as only households liable to French income tax filed income tax declarations at that time. We propose a methodology to estimate the number and average income of non-taxable households before 1986 that also allows us to reconstruct the income distribution of French metropolitan départements for the period 1960-69.