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Relationship between Life Expectancy and GNP/head

The oil exporters' GNP/head figures are less good guides to the state of
economic development than they are in most countries. The oil sector, with
a relatively large impact on a fairly small proportion of the population
distorts the meaning of the figures. A median income per head figure might
be more useful, but is not available for most countries. For centrally
planned economies such as Cuba, there is from some sources a tendency to
underestimate GNP when trying to conjure a figure up from their Net Material
Product system of national accounting, which plays down the role of services.
And with all countries there are difficulties in finding appropriate exchange
rates to convert local currencies into US dollars - purchasing power parities
are difficult to estimate.

The population figures may seem more straightforward - a head is a head is
a head - but the treatment of resident non-nationals (e.g. migrant workers)
can be a problem, and in some countries data is patchy, especially for
rural areas. These factors will all impinge on the modelling of the non-linear
relationship between life expectancy and GNP/head. In most analyses of this
topic China, Cuba and Sri Lanka often show large positive residuals and the
oil exporters large negative residuals.

For an accessible picture of the relationship see, e.g., p.34 of World
Development Report 1993, Oxford Univ Press for the World Bank. And as RAR
implies, a very large part of the difference between countries' life
expectancies relates to differences in their under five mortality rates.

Mike Fuller
Canterbury Business School, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7PE, UK;
phone: +44 (227) 764000 x.7729; fax: +44 (227) 761187; email: mff@ukc.ac.uk