[keiferski]

Any analysis like this that doesn’t factor in the East needing to catch up after 50 years of communist policies is misleading. I would be curious to see the improvement rate in say, Poland and Croatia over the last twenty years factored in and projected into the next two decades. Especially if we include economic success; Poland for example is probably going to be more economically successful than places like Portugal, if it isn’t already.

[viraptor]

You can really see when things changed - newborn life expectancy in Poland https://obserwatorgospodarczy.pl/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/...

[Archelaos]

For Germany, it is instructive to compare detailled maps of life expectancy vs. household income. Both seem to be very much correlated.

A clear East vs. West and to a lesser extent North vs. South difference is obvious. In Western Germany, most region with very low life expectancy are those regions that were under strong economic pressure in recent decades (usually former mining areas, such as the Ruhr Area and the Saarland).

Here is a 2020 map of life expectancy: https://www.demogr.mpg.de/media/13419_main.png

And here a 2019 map of household income: https://www.wsi.de/de/einkommen-14582-einkommen-im-regionale...

Differences is smoking might also have an important impact. Here is a 2013 map: https://bilder.deutschlandfunk.de/FI/LE/_f/47/FILE_f4790b165...

This seems to imply an even closer correlation.

Of course, correlation does not imply direct causation. The underlying causalities might be various, complex and different from region to region.

[FirmwareBurner]

This. This picture only looks at current boomers which heavily favors those in western Europe who live like kings due to wealth, taxation and policies being catered towards them since they make a majority of the voters and caught the good times of economic growth and wealth building, but some of those economies kinda stagnated post 2008, which will mostly affect future generations of retirees not the current ones.

So I expect the picture of future retirees will look very different between countries with growing economies and the ones with declining/stagnating economies.