Countries With Highest Ranked Life Expectancy
New age brought huge contrast in human longevity on the world. Some of the most developed nations, such as Japan and USA have turned in the second half of 20th century in the world's oldest and fastest ageing societies. On the other side, we still have underdeveloped countries with even high infant mortality rates coupled with general low lifespan. In this article, we looked at the dominant countries with the world's longest life expectancy. The countries with highest life expectancy at birth are grouped by geopolitical similarities to point out similarities related to life expectancies of their nations.
1. World's smallest countries
Some of countries in this group include: Monaco, San Marino, Singapore, Macau, Hong Kong, and Lichtenstein to name a few. They are considered to be some of smallest, and in the same time the most densely populated countries in the world. Often are called microstate or ministate. If we look at the statistics of the CIA World Factbook for 2011, these countries are mostly constituting the top of the list with an average life expectancy of 82.5 years. Among them, officially the highest ranked country is the Principality of Monaco with life expectancy of 89.7 years. Not to forget to mention: as you already know - these are also the richest countries when measured on a GNP per capita basis.
2. Small island countries
Group of countries that tops the list of human longevity are also so called island countries. Hereby we do not include island countries such as Australia which occupy a great area surrounded by water, but smaller ones like Guernsey, Isle of Man, Island, Anguilla, Cayman Islands, Bermuda. On these territories statics claims that people live on average 81.1 years. Similar to previous group, these are considered to be very wealthy countries, since they are mostly renowned as offshore finance centers for private equity funds and investors who do not prefer to head their businesses pressed by a restrictive tax policy. So even if you don't own such business, you can settle there and should be able to stretch your life quite good.
3. Developed countries
This is the widest group of leading countries in terms of human life expectancy. Some of countries within this group are: Japan, Australia, Italy, Canada, France, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Israel. Many of these countries are now members of European Union and otherwise belong to west and northern Europe. For many years, Japan was on the top of the list. For example, Japanese women have been blessed with the world's longest life expectancy for number of years, being able to look forward to an average age of 86.3 years. However due to disaster caused by earthquake and tsunami in 2011, they lost their longevity crown. The great disaster left nearly 20,000 dead or missing, causing automatically a decline in average lifespan to 85.9 years.
It's not hard to understand why these countries are on the top of the list, since a life expectancy at birth is also a measure of overall quality of life in a country and summarizes the mortality at all ages. But, how was U.S. ranked on this list? If we consider that generally speaking a quality of life in U.S. can be considered quite good, there is question why the country ranked pretty low - only at position # 50. One of underlying reasons may also be an expensive health care policy. It is expensive for an average U.S. citizen since in Canada (which is ranked considerably higher on this list - at position 12), government covers larger proportion of health insurance (around 70%), in contrast to the case of U.S. where this percentage is generally speaking lower. The national health care system in the States simply does not guarantee a universal health care system for each citizen. Some studies suggest that 40% of U.S. citizens do not have adequate health insurance, if any at all. Other very important reason for this low rank of U.S. on the worldwide list for life expectancy is related to eating habits of Americans. Too much fast food, too much calories, salt, fat - all that together created one of the currently biggest issues for the American society - obesity. If you compare the States with Japan where people have significantly healthier eating habits or Italy (which is ranked #10 on the list) with its famous "Mediterranean Diet", you can get an idea on what every person in the country needs to do, in order to enable U.S. to catch up its peer countries on the list.
