Coale-Demeny Model Life Tables

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.