Trends and Cause Contributions to Area-level Socio-economic Inequalities in Life Expectancy in Australia, 2013-22.

Sergey Timonin, Australian National University
Tim Adair, University of Melbourne
Jenny Welsh, Australian National University
Vladimir Canudas-Romo, Australian National University

Australia has one of the highest life expectancies in the world, but this mortality advantage is not equally shared across the population. This study is the first to examine time trends in area-based socioeconomic inequalities in life expectancy, including age- and cause-specific components to up 2022. We used death registration data and population exposure to estimate life expectancy at birth and cause-specific life-years lost (LYL) for each decile of the Index of Relative Socio-Economic Advantage and Disadvantage for 2013-22. The Slope Index of Inequality (SII) was employed as the main inequality measure. Inequalities in life expectancy widened before peaking in 2016-18 at SII = 4.7 years for women and in 2017-19 for men (SII = 6.8 years). This was due to a lack of improvement or even deterioration in the four lowest deprivation deciles. Since then, the gap has narrowed and the COVID-19 pandemic has had little impact on the size of inequality, with a slight increase only for women. The contribution of causes changed over time and differed by sex, with IHD, lung cancer and COPD being the top three single causes for both sexes, and suicides and transport accidents for men.

Keywords: Decomposition analysis, Mortality and Longevity, Linked data sets

See extended abstract.