Model life table systems are extensively used in demographic, epidemiological and economic analyses. Probably the most widespread use is to infer age patterns of adult mortality, about which comparatively little is known in developing countries, from levels of child mortality, which are much more reliably documented. Yet, substantial evidence has accumulated that these widely used model life table systems do not adequately represent the range of age-specific patterns that are empirically observed. This paper presents the development and testing of a new model life table system based on a modification of the Brass Logit life table system.

   Beginning with the year 1999, WHO began making annual life tables for all Member States. The construction of a life table requires reliable data on a population’s mortality rates, by age and sex. The paper begins with a brief review of the sources, types and quality of the data available. The paper then examines the different sources of data and the problems and difficulties involved in using them in generating life tables.It also provides a brief review of the two main approaches used by WHO to estimate parameters of the Brass logit system for each country. Much of the remainder of the paper is dedicated to a discussion of how the basic demography input for the method, ₅q₀ and ₄₅q₁₅, were estimated for countries. 
   A brief summary of the major findings is provided at the end of the paper, and detailed country-specific and region-specific life tables for WHO’s 191 Member States and WHO 14 sub-Regions are given in an Appendix.

   The current animosity between quantitative cross-national comparativists and area studies scholars originated in the expanding geographic scope of data collection in the 1960s. As quantitative scholars sought to include more countries in their regressions, the measures they were able to find for all observations became less comparable, and those which were available (or appropriate) for fewer than the full set were excluded. Area studies scholars appropriately complain about the violence these procedures do to the political reality they find from their in depth analyses of individual countries, but as quantitative comparativists continue to seek systematic comparisons, the conflict continues. This paper attempts to eliminate a small piece of the basis of this conflict by developing models that enable comparativists to include different explanatory variables, or the same variables with different meanings, in the time-series regression in each country. The paper also demonstrates the advantages of this approach in practice by showing how out-of-sample forecasts from this model out-perform a standard regression approach.

   No consensus has emerged on how to estimate adult mortality in countries lacking complete vital registration of deaths and accurate periodic censuses. This paper applies a range of methods to census, registration and survey data for Guatemala for the period from 1981 to 1994. The findings are less than conclusive because of marked errors in the census populations. Methods using intercensal survival perform very poorly, giving rise to results that are hard to interpret. Methods using the distribution of deaths by age appear to work better, but still give rise to substantially different results. Simulations suggest that a combination of two methods appears to work well. In the Guatemala case, survival of mother appears to over-estimate female adult mortality, whereas survival of siblings appears to underestimate adult mortality. A new method for analyzing intercensal changes in cohort proportions with surviving mother, presented in the paper, gives results broadly consistent with estimates based on adjusted registered deaths.