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THE AVERAGE Australian will live around two years longer than the average Briton. With Americans the gap is four. While the English-speaking world shares some similarities, Australians appear to outlive [...]

Yee Hong Heights, just outside the city of Shenzhen, looks more like a mountain retreat than a care home. Its 260 residents can wander through gardens fringed with palm trees. [...]

Two things can be said with some confidence about the next leader of Islamic State (IS), the jihadist terror group that once controlled swathes of Iraq and Syria. He is [...]

The man, who must be in his 70s, says he has money, even a pension and a house. The similarly-aged woman looks unimpressed. Across a phone connection they are sizing [...]

James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough, in the north-east of England, is home to a world-leading heart unit. The unit was a pioneer in primary angioplasties, in which balloons are [...]

In RECENT YEARS Britain has been hit by one health crisis after another. First came the covid-19 pandemic—then backlogs in health and social care that the coronavirus exacerbated, and a [...]

The most saccharine song of 1980 was 'There's No One Quite Like Grandma', performed by the St Winifred's School choir from Stockport, England. It shot to the top of the [...]

In America and eastern Europe, covid-19 got worse in 2021 T HE END of the second world war was a turning-point in death rates. A new study in Nature Human [...]

When I aged I learnt, That dumbbells make for long lives, Friends are dumbbells too The world's oldest country is searching for the secrets to healthy old age M OST [...]

The government wants to lift the retirement age, but fears a backlash AT ABOUT 54, the average age of retirement in China is among the lowest in the world. This [...]

Four measures show how black, white and Hispanic Americans lead very different lives Editor's note: Twelve months on from the killing of George Floyd, The Economist is publishing a series [...]

But racial gaps across these and other indicators remain wide Editor's note: Twelve months on from the killing of George Floyd, The Economist is publishing a series of articles, films, [...]

Health inequality in England was bad. It has got worse TEN YEARS ago the Marmot Review, a study commissioned by the government, asked a big, complicated question: why do some [...]

The life-expectancy gap between black and white Americans has steadily declined BACK IN 1980 when Harlem was still a byword for poverty, criminality and the decline of New York City, [...]

The case for universal health care is a powerful one--including in poor countries BY MANY measures the world has never been in better health. Since 2000 the number of children [...]

Long day's journey Why life expectancy is down for the second year in a row JUST as Americans headed home for the year-end holidays, the Centres for Disease Control and [...]

How to make the most of ageing populations FOR MOST OF history humans lived only long enough to ensure the survival of the species. Today babies born in the West [...]

Between 1990 and 2015 Rwanda made the greatest strides in human development, according to the UN's annual Human Development Index (HDI), which looks at life expectancy, income and education. Rwandans [...]

China is ill prepared for a consequence of ageing: lots of people with dementia ON A stage decorated with tinsel and fairy lights, Liu Changsheng is singing 'The East is [...]

As a pensions crisis looms, China looks at raising the retirement age IN THE 1950s, when China's civil war was only just over and life expectancy still below 45, setting [...]

DURING the next 150 years mankind will gradually or suddenly become able to put matter together atom by atom, and bodies together virtually gene by gene. This means that nearly [...]

There has been a decrease in the proportions of life spent in paid work with the increase in life expectancy. For its 35th edition, Social Trends includes a special review highlighting some of the major changes in society since the beginning of the annual publications.