Average life expectancy or more on data visualization

In continuation of my series of posts about data visualization (Dynamical maps and Gapminder), let me show you today another cool resource: interactive map of the world StatPlanet.

Here is for example a map showing average age in different countries (data from 2006):

Russia seems to be rather mature country on this map – average age is about 37 years, even higher than in US. Nice? Not quite. Here is another map – a trickier one. What’s shown here is the total number of 15-year-old people who are expected to die before achieving their 60s (this number is calculated using current known mortality rates).

The world record belongs to Lesoto (72.2%), while the rate for Russia is 30% and, surprisingly, 29.6% for Sudan. That is, in this respect the situation in Russia is worse than in Sudan.

The data are collected by WHO (World Health Organization) and published on their site, in a somewhat tricky format though – Adult mortality rate (probability of dying between 15 to 60 years per 1000 population) both sexes.

Now it would be nice to compare the first map with the second and, say, determine percentage of population to die out before 2050 (the higher is average age of the population and the higher is the mortality rate, the larger is this percentage), but unfortunately StatPlanet does not allow this.

Via Sergey Schegloff.