Life Expectancy by Skin Color or Race in Brazil: Regional Estimates
Author: Cássio Maldonado Turra and Laura Carvalho Andrade
Edition: 1st
Published in: May 2026
This report concludes the project “Life Expectancy by Skin Color or Race in Brazil”, developed in partnership with Cedeplar/UFMG. The objective was to build, for the year 2015, an integrated system of life tables by Unit of the Federation (UF), sex and race/skin color (whites and nonwhites), compatible simultaneously with national mortality standards, with official IBGE references and with subnational evidence on racial inequalities.
The starting point of the project is a well-known but methodologically challenging diagnosis: there are no consolidated and stable official statistics on mortality by skin color/race at the subnational level in Brazil. Although administrative records include this variable, their quality and territorial comparability are heterogeneous. Thus, the strategy adopted was to develop an indirect estimation system, anchored in explicit demographic constraints, capable of reconciling multiple sources and producing plausible, auditable and internally coherent results. The methodology evolved cumulatively in five stages (Methods 1 to 5), progressively incorporating territorial heterogeneity and vertical discipline.
We present statistics for UF and also by region. In addition, we present a sensitivity analysis of the results of Method 5, adopted as the set of estimates most consistent with the constraints and validations established in the project. The estimates produced should be interpreted as approximations, anchored in explicit hypotheses and equally explicit validation procedures. These are not measures observed in the strict sense, but rather decompositions of total mortality, informed by national patterns of racial inequality and regional indicators of infant mortality. The purpose is to offer, for each UF and sex, a set of life tables by race/skin color that is at the same time comparable between units, compatible with official statistics, and transparent as to the methodological choices involved.
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