I looked over the list of all 131 countries that have life expectency data at that site. Four African countries have indeed shown falling LE over the past 20 yrs: Botswana, Zambia, Uganda, Rawanda. I presume AIDS and genocide are the main culprits there.
Also, most of the former Soviet republics show a decrease! But I wonder if that's not partially due to inflated statistics from the Soviet era -- it's not hard to believe they would have exaggerated their successes back in the central super-state propaganda days.
Also, the declines in the former-USSR are pretty small and LE is still generally high (like LE went down from 70 to 68 years.)
|