Coale-Demeny Model Life Tables
Also known as: Coale-Demeny Life Tables, Regional Model Life Tables, Coale-Demeny System
The Coale-Demeny regional model life tables are a system of standard age patterns of mortality, distilled from hundreds of empirical life tables into four regional families — North, South, East, and West — each indexed by a mortality level. Given only a single summary of mortality, such as life expectancy at birth or a child-survival measure, the system supplies a complete, internally consistent age schedule of death rates. For decades they have been the default tool for inferring full mortality patterns in populations with incomplete or unreliable death data, especially in developing countries and historical demography.
Key highlights
- Produce a complete, internally consistent age schedule of mortality from a single summary input.
- Grounded in a large body of empirical life tables, so the patterns are realistic rather than purely theoretical.
- Offer four regional families to match different real age patterns of mortality.
- Long-established and widely supported, making them a comparable standard across studies and decades.
Intuition
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How it works
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When to use it
Use Coale-Demeny model life tables when a population's mortality data are incomplete, defective, or available only as a summary measure, and you need a plausible full age schedule of mortality — the classic settings being developing countries, historical populations, and indirect estimation. They pair naturally with indirect child- and adult-mortality estimation methods. Assumptions: the population's age pattern of mortality resembles one of the four regional families, mortality is not strongly distorted by epidemics or HIV/AIDS-type causes that the families do not represent, and a reliable mortality summary is available. Do NOT use them for populations whose age pattern departs from all four families (notably high-HIV settings, for which special model tables exist), and do NOT treat the selected table as a measured life table — it is a model imputation, so quantify the uncertainty in the family and level chosen.
Strengths & limitations
- Produce a complete, internally consistent age schedule of mortality from a single summary input.
- Grounded in a large body of empirical life tables, so the patterns are realistic rather than purely theoretical.
- Offer four regional families to match different real age patterns of mortality.
- Long-established and widely supported, making them a comparable standard across studies and decades.
- The four families do not span every real mortality pattern; some populations fit none well, especially high-HIV settings.
- Choosing the wrong family or level imposes an incorrect age pattern and biases derived estimates.
- They are based largely on historical (mostly European-origin) data and may misrepresent other contexts.
- The output is a model imputation, not a measured life table, and carries model uncertainty that is easy to overlook.
Common pitfalls
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Applications
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Frequently asked
What distinguishes the four Coale-Demeny families?
The North, South, East, and West families differ mainly in the relative levels of mortality at different ages — particularly the balance between childhood and old-age mortality. For example, the South family has comparatively high infant and old-age mortality and lower mortality in childhood, while West, derived from the broadest set of tables, represents a general average pattern and is used when no specific regional pattern applies.
How do I choose which family and level to use?
The level is set by matching the system to a known mortality summary such as life expectancy at birth or an infant/child mortality rate. The family is chosen from prior knowledge of the population's age pattern of mortality, by comparing multiple available mortality indicators, or by defaulting to West when no information distinguishes the patterns. The choice should be made transparently because it affects the imputed schedule.
Are Coale-Demeny tables suitable for high-HIV populations?
Generally no. The HIV epidemic produces an age pattern of adult mortality that none of the four classical families represents well, so applying them distorts the schedule. Specialized model life tables and HIV-specific mortality models were developed for such settings, and these should be used instead of the standard Coale-Demeny families.
Sources
- 1.Coale, A. J., Demeny, P., & Vaughan, B. (1983). Regional Model Life Tables and Stable Populations (2nd ed.). Academic Press, New York.ISBN 9780121770808
- 2.Preston, S. H., Heuveline, P., & Guillot, M. (2001). Demography: Measuring and Modeling Population Processes. Blackwell.ISBN 9781557864512
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ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Coale-Demeny Model Life Tables. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/demography/coale-demeny-model-life-tables