WHO methods and data sources for life tables 2000-2021

Overview

The World Health Organization (WHO) began producing annual life tables for all Member States in 1999. These life tables are a basic input to all WHO estimates of global, regional and country-level patterns and trends in all-cause and cause-specific mortality. Since 1998, WHO has been producing annual abridged life tables for Member States as part of its mandate to monitor and report on global progress in improving health. During the MDG era, WHO has been estimating time series of life tables from 1990 onwards. To support its reporting on progress towards the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, WHO has released updated annual life tables for Member States for the period 2000-2019. These are available in the WHO Global Health Observatory and in World Health Statistics Reports. These updated life tables also provide the all-cause mortality estimates for the WHO Global Health Estimates 2019 (GHE2019) released in 2020. 

For almost all WHO Member States, this current update draws on the population estimates from the 2024 revision of World Population Prospects (WPP2024) prepared by the UN Population Division (UNPD), death registration data reported to WHO by Member States, as well as on infant and child mortality rates under 15 years of age that have been developed and agreed upon by the Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN-IGME) which is made up of WHO, UNICEF, UNPD, World Bank and academic groups, UNAIDS/WHO estimates of HIV mortality for countries with high HIV prevalence, and mortality estimates from the Global Burden of Disease 2021 (GBD2021) study.

Consultations with Member States were carried out for life table mortality rates and life expectancies in March-April 2024.