What is Premature Mortality? There are two different approaches to measure it, an absolute one (setting a unique age threshold then dividing deaths into premature and adult) and a relative one (deriving the share of premature deaths from the age distribution of deaths). Both have pros and cons. The main disadvantage of the absolute approach is that of using a unique threshold for different mortality patterns, while the main disadvantage of the relative approach is that the estimate of premature mortality it conveys strongly depends on how the adult deaths distribution is defined in each country. In this work, I try to reconcile the two approaches by means of a hierarchical model, where the adult deaths distribution is kept fixed for each country as a pivotal quantity and the premature mortality floats around it. In this way, adult mortality is the same for each country and the premature mortality estimates are more comparable across countries.

Stefano Mazzuco is an Associate Professor in Demography at the Department of Statistical Sciences in the University of Padova, teaching both Demography and Statistics. He is also a member of the PhD School in Statistics Board. He is collaborating with the World Health Organisation (WHO) on the field of health inequality and its costs. He also has research interests in mortality pattern modelling, mainly focusing on age of death distribution modelling.