The Life Expectancy Data
Download the life expectancy data (plain text).
Life expectancy refers to the average lifetime in years a newborn child is expected to live. Life expectancy is a good indicator of a country’s overall health and well-being. The life expectancy data file contains life expectancy for 197 countries and territories. These data were assembled by Gapminder (link to an external website, opens in new window), using sources such as the United Nations, the Human Mortality Database, the Human Life-Table Data base, and more.
The life expectancy data are available in the data file LifeExpDatacomplete.txt. In this file, the first row is a list of the variable names. Starting on the second row, there is one row for each country or territory. The values of the variables on each row are separated by spaces. The variables on each row are:
- Country
- Region – One of: America, East Asia & Pacific, Europe & Central Asia, Middle East & North Africa, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa
- LifeExp — The country’s life expectancy in 2012, in years
- GDP — The country’s Gross Domestic Product per capita in 2012
- HIV – Percentage of adults aged 15-49 with HIV
HIV and GDP are not available for 50 of the countries. For these countries, the missing HIV and GDP are given as NA.
With these data, we can investigate the relationship between a country’s life expectancy and region of the world, wealth (as measured by GDP per capita), and HIV infection rate.
Learn more about the Gapminder data and find additional variables at the Gapminder website (link to an external website, opens in new window).
Watch Gapminder’s co-founder Hans Rosling tell a fascinating story with data in the BBC video “200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes” (link to an external website, opens in new window).