Regional Differences in Life Expectancy in Mainland China

China’s Central government is currently undertaking extensive pension reforms which requires accurate life expectancy forecasts at both national and regional levels. However, the lack of prior research in this area is an obstacle to policy formulation. The aim of this research is to investigate the trend of China’s regional differences in life expectancy. Three contributions of this thesis are as follows. First, we constructed 800 national and regional life tables (by province and for urban and rural populations) based on a unique hand collected mortality dataset. This extends investigations of life expectancy beyond just the national level. The analysis of the life tables reveals that significantly increasing life expectancy differences exist between urban and rural populations between 1990 and 2010. In addition, we find that across all regions the differences in life expectancy at birth and at age 65 were mainly driven by the differences in life expectancy of the rural population in each region. Second, estimations of future mortality improvements using constructed life tables and the extended Lee-Carted model which addresses the limited availability of mortality data shows a stable difference between the urban and rural population over next twenty-five years. Moreover, this thesis shows a narrowed regional difference for urban population and a widen regional difference for rural population in the future. Third, the growth rate of GDP, GDP per capita, income per capita and the change in the number of doctors per 10,000 people all show relatively strong correlations with the change of the index of kt. Moreover, the sensitivity analysis displays that life expectancy at birth in the least developed regions will catch up with the developing regions by 2040.