Forecasting mortality rates for India using Lee-Carter model with applications to projecting population pyramid, gender imbalance and dependency ratio

Abstract

While the Lee-Carter model is considered to be the leading framework for computing mortality risk in the past two decades, it is yet to be used in modeling Indian mortality prior to the present study. The LC model is applied for the total Indian population, and also separately male, female, rural and urban subpopulations and the mortality rates are forecasted for the remainder of the century. This allows computing projected expected life at birth and comparing it across different sub-populations. Application of the Lee-Carter model for the male and female subgroups, in combination with the forecasted birth rate and possible considerations of the gender ratio at birth, lead to the projection of the overall age-wise population pyramid for the forecast period. We propose a measure of gender-imbalance that takes into account the gender diversity across the different age-groups. This gender-imbalance index is forecasted using the projected mortality rates. The projected age-dependency ratio is a significant outcome of the undertaken research.