Decades of Disparity: Ethnic mortality trends in New Zealand 1980

Decades of Disparity: Ethnic mortality trends in New Zealand 1980 - 1999
Public Health Intelligence Occasional Bulletin Number 16
ISBN 0-478-25660-4 (Book)
ISBN 0-478-25661-2 (Website)
HP 3641

Date of publication: July 2003

The Public Health Intelligence Group of the Ministry of Health publishes a series of occasional bulletins on the health status of New Zealanders, updating and extending the comprehensive review carried out in 1999 and reported in Our Health Our Future – Hauora Pakiri, Koiora Roa.

The sixteenth bulletin in this series, Decades of Disparity: Ethnic mortality trends in New Zealand 1980 – 1999, recalculates ethnic mortality rates and life expectancies over the 1980s and 1990s using a record linkage process that matches census and mortality records to adjust for numerator – denominator bias.

For the first time, undercounting of Maori and Pacific deaths in the mortality time series is compensated for, and the results are concerning: disparities in survival chances between Maori and Pacific ethnic groups and other New Zealanders have widened substantially over the past twenty years.

The report provides adjusted ethnic mortality rates by gender, age group and major causes of death for this twenty year period. It also provides estimates of ethnic life expectancies, and examines the contribution of different age and cause groups to the disparities in life expectancy over this period.

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