Pollard Decomposition

Pollard's decomposition breaks a difference in life expectancy between two populations into additive contributions from each age, showing exactly how much of the gap is due to mortality differences at infancy, in midlife, or in old age. John Pollard derived a continuous-age formula expressing the life-expectancy difference as an integral of the age-specific mortality-rate difference weighted by life-table functions. Because the contributions sum exactly to the total gap and can be further split by cause of death, the method is a standard tool for explaining why one population outlives another.