Bridging the Longevity Divide
A Dialogue Paper examining the differences in life expectancy across socio-economic groups and potential retirement income implications, including lifetime income products.
Australians’ life expectancies can vary by more than a decade depending on their income, home ownership, marital status and where they live, revealing a “longevity divide” across the country.
This new Dialogue Paper, Bridging the Longevity Divide, identified a striking 11.5 year difference in life expectancy at age 60 between men in the most and least advantaged socio-economic profiles examined. Among women, the gap was 9.1 years.
The extent of these longevity disparities is wider than those previously reported, for example, by the Australian Government Actuary. This reflects the greater socio-economic stratification used in the analysis.
"These findings provide an important evidence base for individuals, communities and society at large to better understand longevity differences. They are also useful for informing discussions on retirement income, superannuation and broader policy."
— Dr Fei Huang, co-author
In addition to retirement income solutions, the findings could inform public information resources, superannuation fund calculators, and adviser conversations. These could help people in and approaching retirement to better understand their own longevity risk – their personal risk of outliving their savings.
"We encourage the industry to consider how it could use this new evidence to explore expanding the range of retirement income strategies and products that speak to a greater spectrum of Australians. As highlighted in the recent Intergenerational Report from the Government, the retirement income system is expected to play a growing role in the decades to come."
— Philip Clark, co-author
About the authors
Dr Fei Huang, Philip Clark, Dr Francis Hui and Dr Andrés Villegas
Dr Fei Huang is an Associate Professor in the School of Risk and Actuarial Studies at UNSW Sydney. Her research focuses on responsible AI and data-driven decision-making, particularly for insurance and superannuation (retirement income) applications. Fei explores how to make insurance more equitable, affordable, and sustainable — especially in the context of AI and climate change.
Philip Clark is a Senior Consultant at Azuria Partners and a member of the Retirement Income Sub-Committee of the Actuaries Institute. He is a specialist in lifetime income pricing, longevity risk management and retirement income optimisation.
Dr Francis Hui is an Associate Professor of Statistics in the Research School of Finance, Actuarial Studies, and Statistics at the Australian National University (ANU). His research interests span a combination of multivariate and spatio-temporal data analysis, dimension reduction and variable selection, semiparametric regression, and approximate statistical estimation and inference.
Dr Andrés Villegas is an Associate Professor in the School of Risk and Actuarial Studies at UNSW Sydney. He holds a PhD in Actuarial Science from Bayes Business School (City St George’s, University of London), and specialises in mortality modelling, longevity risk, and actuarial applications of analytics.Dr Fei Huang is an Associate Professor in the School of Risk and Actuarial Studies at UNSW Sydney. Her research focuses on responsible AI and data-driven decision-making, particularly for insurance and superannuation (retirement income) applications. Fei explores how to make insurance more equitable, affordable, and sustainable — especially in the context of AI and climate change
Dialogue Papers are a series of papers written by actuaries and published by the Actuaries Institute. The papers aim to stimulate discussion on important, emerging issues. Opinions expressed in this publication are the opinions of the Paper’s author/s and do not necessarily represent those of the Institute.
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