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	Brass Growth Balance Method	Life Table
Field	Demography	Demography
Family	Process / pipeline	Survival analysis
Year of origin	1975	1984
Originator	William Brass	Demographic/actuarial tradition; Chiang
Type	Death distribution method for estimating the completeness of death registration	Age-structured mortality estimator
Seminal source	Preston, S. H., Heuveline, P., & Guillot, M. (2001). Demography: Measuring and Modeling Population Processes. Blackwell. ISBN: 9781557864512	Chiang, C. L. (1984). The Life Table and Its Applications. Robert E. Krieger Publishing. ISBN: 978-0-89874-565-2
Aliases	Brass growth balance equation, GBM, Death registration completeness estimation, Brass Büyüme Dengesi Yöntemi	Mortality Table, Actuarial Table, Survival Table, Yaşam Tablosu
Related	4	3
Summary	The Brass growth balance method estimates how complete a country's death registration is when vital statistics are incomplete but a census age distribution exists. Developed by William Brass in 1975, it rests on a simple demographic accounting identity applied above every age: in a stable population the rate at which people enter an open-ended age group must equal the population growth rate plus the rate at which they leave it by dying. Plotting the entry rate against the observed death rate above each age yields a straight line whose slope reveals the fraction of deaths actually registered.	A life table is a systematic, age-structured summary of the mortality experience of a population. It traces a hypothetical cohort of births — conventionally 100,000 — through successive age intervals, recording how many survive, how many die, and how many person-years are lived at each interval. The method was formalized in its modern probabilistic form by Chiang (1984), synthesizing centuries of actuarial and demographic practice into a rigorous statistical framework applicable to human and biological populations alike.