Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of past and recent trends in the development of the process of rectangularization of the survival curve in selected Eastern European countries (the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Russia, Bulgaria) for which data are available in Human Mortality Database. Whenever useful, we made a comparison with Sweden, a representative of developed low mortality countries.
The process of rectangularization is defined as a trend toward a more rectangular shape of the survival curve thanks to an increasing number of survivors and concentration of deaths around the modal age of death in a population. That means that variability of the age at death is decreasing and deaths are “compressed” to a higher age.
In this study we used almost thirty indicators, some of which are commonly applied in demographic analysis and some were developed or adjusted specifically for the analysis of the rectangularization process.