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.