Temporal Dynamics of Violent Mortality in Colombia. The Impact of Violence on Colombian Life Expectancy and Lifespan Inequality

Rafael Navarro , Phd Student

Lifespan inequality is the source of all inequalities, given that all other forms of inequality are conditional to the fact of being alive. Lifespan inequality is an indicator of how similar ages at death are and an important tool to make effective public health decisions on the population. Lifespan inequality captures macro-level heterogeneities, but also shows the survival uncertainty at the individual level, it is highly sensitive to premature mortality and may give a better understanding of the effects of violence on population health. Previous studies (García & Aburto, 2019), show the importance of researching lifespan inequalities in the region. Latin America has experienced considerable improvements in health care, living standards, and sanitation in the last 50 years, but at the same time, is a violence-prone region, experiencing different types, intensities, and forms of violence. We intend to show here the Colombian case, a country that experienced extremely high levels of violence at the end of the decade of the 1990s but now, by Latin American standards, has below-average levels of homicide. In this paper, we intend through decomposition, to dissect contributions (in years) to changes in life expectancy and lifespan inequality by each cause of death at each age. With this, we will be able to show the changes in violent mortality in different periods of Colombian recent history, showing how violent mortality has changed the lifespan panorama in the country and providing more elements for the discussion in the region.

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 Presented in Session P1. Postercafe