Creating Complete Mortality Life Tables for CARICOM: The Cases of Trinidad & Tobago and Jamaica

Complete population mortality tables (CPMTs) provide mortality rates and life expectancies at successive integer ages starting at age 0 and ending at a sufficiently high age (e.g., age 100 years). CPMTs are important because they enable evidence-based analysis and decision-making across various government sectors. CPMTs are also important for actuaries in developing countries where credible mortality data on insured lives may be scarce. Despite CPMTs' importance, countries in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), like many other developing countries, do not have CPMTs. Instead, many CARICOM countries produce their own abridged population mortality tables (APMTs), which are less informative than CPMTs because they provide mortality and life expectancy information for grouped age intervals. As Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica are two of the largest economies in CARICOM, our goal is to use their most recent existing APMTs and convert them to CPMTs. The mortality plots produced by Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica APMTs show "accident humps" for both male and female mortality rates, which make them suitable for the Heligman–Pollard (H&P) method of expanding APMTs. Although CARICOM countries are diverse in many ways, they are sufficiently similar that mortality tables produced for Trinidad and Tobago and for Jamaica will be more relevant to CARICOM countries than tables based on the mortality experience of developed countries such as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, or members of the European Union. Hence we anticipate that these tables will benefit Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica and will be used by other CARICOM countries with minimum modifications to aid their governments' planning.