Life expectancy

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Life expectancy

Figure 7: Life expectancy at birth, by gender and ethnicity, 1951–2006

How to interpret results - figures

See data source for figure 7 >

Figure: Life expectancy at birth, by gender and ethnicity, 1951–2006.

Note: Adjusted life expectancy estimates for Maori 1980–1999 use estimates from the New Zealand Census – Mortality Study graphed
at the mid-point of each time period. From 2001, adjusted estimates are close to unadjusted.

Sources: Blakely et al 2007; Statistics New Zealand

In 2006, life expectancy at birth was 70.4 years for Māori males and 75.1 years for Māori females, while life expectancy at birth for non-Māori males was 79.0 years and for non-Māori females 83.0 years. Overall, in 2006, Māori life expectancy at birth was at least eight years less than that for non-Māori for both genders.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, Māori mortality was seriously undercounted due to the use of a different ethnicity data recording system on death registration forms compared with that used for the census. The broken lines on Figure 5 for Māori males and females represent adjusted life expectancy from the New Zealand Census Mortality Study (NZCMS). This adjusted life expectancy takes into account the undercounting of Māori deaths, thereby providing more reliable life expectancy estimates over this period (Ajwani et al 2003; Blakely et al 2007).

Most notably, Figure 7 shows that Māori life expectancy rapidly increased up until the late 1970s or early 1980s, after which Māori life expectancy was (mostly) static while non-Māori life expectancy continued to increase. Since the late 1990s, Māori life expectancy has been increasing at about the same rate as non-Māori, or even slightly faster (Blakely et al 2007).

References
Blakely T, Tobias M, Atkinson J, et al. 2007. Tracking Disparity: Trends in ethnic and socioeconomic inequalities in mortality, 1981–2004. Wellington: Ministry of Health.
Ajwani S, Blakely T, Robson B, et al. 2003. Decades of Disparity: Ethnic mortality trends in New Zealand 1920-1999. Wellington: Ministry of Health and University of Otago.

Page last updated: 21 July 2010

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