Australia enjoys one of the highest life expectancies in the world, particularly for men. However, these positive national trends mask significant social inequalities in mortality and health within the country. Existing whole-population studies have reported increasing socioeconomic disparities in Australia up to 2016, while recent trends, including during the COVID-19 pandemic, are largely unknown.

Using the Person Level Integrated Data Asset (PLIDA), we estimated area-based socioeconomic inequalities in life expectancy in Australia for 2013-22 using a range of measures. We then decomposed the gap between the top and bottom deprivation deciles into the contribution of age and causes of death and assessed the time trends in excess life-years lost (LYL) for major causes of death. Patterns of inequality in LYL from COVID-19 deaths were of particular interest. Finally, we compared the magnitude of inequalities derived from the unlinked and census-death linked dataframes.

Dr. Sergey Timonin joined the ANU School of Demography as a Research Fellow in early 2023. Before moving to the ANU. Sergey worked at the Higher School of Economics (University) in Moscow, Russia, and was a guest researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Germany. Sergey is a population geographer and demographer interested in the study of mortality and population health. He has worked extensively on understanding geographical and socioeconomic inequalities in life expectancy in Eastern Europe, English-speaking countries, and now Australia; examining cause-specific mortality patterns and trends between and within high-income countries; and estimating excess mortality due to the Covid-19 pandemic and severe weather conditions.

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