The relationship between Gross Domestic Product per capita and Life Expectancy.

Author

Emma Rand

Introduction

There is a relationship between wealth and health (Pollack et al. 2007). We will explore this relationship using the relationship between Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita and Life Expectancy across countries and over time.

Methods

We took per capita GDP and life expectancy data from 12 years (from 1952 to 2007) for each of 142 countries. Analysis was carried out with R (R Core Team 2026) and tidyverse (Wickham et al. 2019) packages.

Results

Data about about the five most populated countries in is shown in Table 1.

Table 1: Five most populated countries in 2007.
country continent year lifeExp pop gdpPercap
China Asia 2007 72.961 1318683096 4959.115
India Asia 2007 64.698 1110396331 2452.210
United States Americas 2007 78.242 301139947 42951.653
Indonesia Asia 2007 70.650 223547000 3540.652
Brazil Americas 2007 72.390 190010647 9065.801

Data about about the five most wealthy countries in is shown in Table 2.

Table 2: Five most wealthy countries in 2007.
country continent year lifeExp pop gdpPercap
Norway Europe 2007 80.196 4627926 49357.19
Kuwait Asia 2007 77.588 2505559 47306.99
Singapore Asia 2007 79.972 4553009 47143.18
United States Americas 2007 78.242 301139947 42951.65
Ireland Europe 2007 78.885 4109086 40676.00

The relationship between Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita and Life Expectancy across countries in 1952 and 2007 is in Figure 1.

(a)
(b)
Figure 1: The relationship between Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita and Life Expectancy across countries in 2007 (Figure 1 (a)) and 1952 (Figure 1 (b)). Each point represents a country, plotted by gross domestic product (GDP) per capita (international dollars, x-axis) against life expectancy at birth in years (y-axis). Point colour indicates continental region and point size is proportional to population size (millions). Data are from Gapminder and were analysed with R and tidyverse packages.

Discussion

References

Pollack, Craig Evan, Sekai Chideya, Catherine Cubbin, Brie Williams, Mercedes Dekker, and Paula Braveman. 2007. “Should Health Studies Measure Wealth?: A Systematic Review.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 33 (3): 250–64. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2007.04.033.
R Core Team. 2026. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org/.
Wickham, Hadley, Mara Averick, Jennifer Bryan, et al. 2019. Welcome to the Tidyverse. 4: 1686. https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01686.