Life Expectancy Index: Age Structure of Population and Environment Evolution

Tolerance, Technology and Talent indexes that are found in the literature and used to compare cities tend to focus more on economic and technologic progress. However, time is important, this paper presents a Life Expectancy Index (LEI) for the 40 OECD countries computed as a weighted average of three dimensions: population pyramid base (such as fertility, dependency, population, life expectancy per sex, birth and fertility rates), enterprise contamination (methane and nitrogenous gases population density) and civil contamination (deaths and greenhouse emissions) obtained in a factorial analysis, where the weights are calculated with the IRFs of the estimated VECM. The ranking of the countries provides policy-makers with a sense of where improvements might be targeted. For each timespan, 1970–2012, 2000–2012 and 2008–2012, Mexico, Korea and Israel are the countries where the index is higher while Sub-Sahara, Russia and Hungary are the ones where the index is lower.