International mortality modelling-An economic perspective

- I show the US leads in health technology and the UK follows with a lag of about 7 years.
- I develop a model linking mortality across populations by technology diffusion.
- An empirical analysis based on US and UK mortality data validates this approach.
- Existing approaches are shown empirically to be deficient.
- Forecasts based on my model are better than the standard approach.

A recent literature has developed on modelling mortality in multiple populations together. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a reason why mortality in different populations may be related based on an economic literature on technology and knowledge diffusion.