Do Japanese and Italian women live longer than women in Scandinavia?

Life expectancies at birth are routinely computed from period life tables. Such period life expectancies may be distorted by selection when comparing countries where the living conditions improved earlier (like Norway and Sweden) with countries where they improved later (like Italy and Japan). One way to get a fair comparison between the countries, is to use cohort data and consider the expected number of years lost before a given age a. Contrary to the results based on period data, one then finds that Italian women may expect to lose more years than women in Norway and Sweden, while there are no indications that Japanese women will lose fewer years than Scandinavian women.