Geographical Coverage

The research questions of the project will be tackled through measuring and interpreting geographical differences in age- and cause-specific mortality at various levels of sub-national spatial aggregation across and within more than 20 European countries/territories divided into three geo-political groups:

1. Countries of Western Europe: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and West Germany;
2. Post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE): Czechia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia;
3. Countries of the former USSR (FSU): Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia and Ukraine.

The selection of these countries was determined by both the objectives of the project and the feasibility of obtaining data on mortality and socioeconomic indicators at the local level. As a result, only countries with available data are considered in this project. Denmark, Finland and Sweden provide high-quality data sets allowing unravelling contextual effects after controlling for individual characteristics (multi-level modelling). Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Germany allow trans-border case studies among countries representing ‘old’ members of the EU. The CEE countries represent the cases of very rapid improvements in life expectancy, and it is interesting to learn how these positive trends affected mortality differentials within these countries. Finally, the selected FSU countries form a very fascinating context in terms of the common past and the quite distinct present (the entry into the EU and liberal systems of the Baltic States versus autocratic political systems in Belarus and Russia).

We aim at collecting mortality data, population exposures and contextual variables at different regional levels (NUTS-2, NUTS-3 and LAU) from 1990 onwards.

The collected data will be documented and put in a data repository. Data conforming to data protection and dissemination rules will be released for public use upon project completion. This will ensure the reproducibility of the scientific output produced by REDIM and facilitate further research on the topic.

Study Regions