Compression of mortality: the evolution in the variability in the age of death in Latin America

In this paper, we investigate the evolution of the mortality age profile and the distribution of age at death in a series of Latin America countries. Latin America presents an interesting case study because of the peculiarities of epidemiological and health transitions. We use data from different and alternative sources to investigate the compression of mortality in Latin America. We concentrated our analysis in three main points. First, we evaluate the quality of data that underlie national-level mortality overtime in LAC countries. Second, we estimated an adequate age pattern of mortality for Latin America. Third, we analyze the evolution of the distribution of deaths over age and time in order to identify the effects of changes on the variability of age at death. The results indicate that the quality of mortality data is improving over time for all countries included in this study. We also find a reduction in variability of age at death, and that the reduction was faster for females than males.