Explaining the relation between life expectancy and income inequality with fuzzy linguistic summaries

Abstract

Life expectancy is an essential indicator of economic development and health status. However, the related databases describing the overall life expectancy are relatively large and created under conditions of uncertainty, particularly regarding adjustments related to redistributing deaths of unknown age or splitting data into finer age categories. In parallel, comprehension of general trends related to the life expectancy indicator is a crucial topic from the perspective of both the private and public sectors. It supports long-term decision-making about social policies. The key question addressed in this study is the relation between life expectancy and income inequality. Fuzzy linguistic summarization is applied to explore the inequity measured with the Gini coefficient and life expectancy. We show that the outcomes of this intelligent linguistic analysis reveal new information that complements the traditional correlation analysis. The fuzzy summarization approach enables capturing and explaining, in a human-consistent way, the relations between the considered indicators. The experimental results are presented for yearly data from 24 European countries observed from 1995 to 2021. The results are promising and show the usefulness of the linguistic summarization approach for explaining the relation between life expectancy and income inequality. In particular, although the length of life varies according to gender, the relationship between life expectancy and inequality follows a similar pattern for females and males. The relationship may seem intuitive, but previous research does not confirm it unequivocally. Furthermore, our study shows a level of inequality for which changes in income distribution do not significantly impact life expectancy. JEL Classification: C0 , J1