Significant decreases in mortality among black Americans have reduced the racial gap in life expectancy in the US. At the same time, mortality rates and its income-related inequalities are much larger among both black and white Americans compared to those of Europeans.
This is what a team of researchers led by Janet Currie and Hannes Schwandt found in a study recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). ESHPM and ESE colleagues Marlies Bär, Dr. Bram Wouterse, Carlos Riumallo-Herl, Prof. Tom van Ourti, and Prof. Eddy van Doorslaer contributed with data for the Netherlands. The findings were picked up and discussed by several international media outlets like The Guardian and The Atlantic.
The authors examine racial specific trends in mortality across income groups in the US and compare these with trends in Europe in 1990 to 2018. Their main findings are that the US racial gap in life expectancy decreased among all income groups since 1990, mainly due to the large reductions among black Americans in poor areas. The largest part of this improvement can be attributed to causes of death related to cancer, homicide, HIV and those originating in the fetal or infant period. Nonetheless, the US is lagging behind if compared to European countries, even when compared to Portugal which had higher mortality rates than the 1990 white population in the US. The US mortality rate itself is not only higher in all income groups when compared to Europe, also the mortality gap between poorer and richer groups is much wider in the US.
The mortality trends for each of these European countries, including the Netherlands, are researched more in depth in separate papers published in a special issue of Fiscal Studies. Interested in the Dutch results? Read the full paper here.
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