A roadmap to EU comparable data on mortality differentials by educational attainment

Veronica Corsini, European Commission

The aim of this paper is to present an on-going project in Eurostat to develop comparable information about mortality by educational attainment on a regular basis for all EU Member States. After analysing the indicators' current availability, Eurostat decided to collect the needed input data in order to subsequently calculate comparable mortality differentials by educational attainment using the same methodology for all available EU MSs. As a first step, Eurostat can calculate the indicators using data already available and collected in the yearly demographic questionnaire. Since reference year 2007, Eurostat requests countries to transmit annually a breakdown of population and deaths by ISCED97 broad education classes. The calculation of mortality differentials can be done directly for the countries providing both deaths and population series by the requested breakdown. For the countries not providing breakdown for the population, alternative sources are being evaluated, for example the EU Labour Force Survey. This cross-sectional approach is currently feasible for 12 EU MSs but Eurostat is aware that this number will increase in the near future due to recent developments in data availability. In parallel, Eurostat is encouraging the National Statistical Institutes to carry out the "census records linkage" and follow-up on the occasion of the 2011 census round. Although it is likely that the requested data would not be available before 2-3 years after the census, immediate action is required. Despite the long implementation time the aim is to achieve a complete coverage of the countries taking advantage of the forthcoming census. Based on the information recently become available, some NSIs are indeed planning to carry out the census linkage exercise to derive data on mortality by educational attainment; in some other cases, it would not be a classical linkage census-deaths but different registers would be linked to obtain the needed data.