Literate Life Expectancy in Bangladesh: A New Approach of Social Indicator

Social indicators have been used informally for a very long time, particularly in economics, to assess the state of the nation and progress towards national objectives. Measuring people’s quality of life emphasizes human well being and particularly issues of equity, poverty, and gender. In this context, this paper uses a latest indicator of social development, Literate Life Expectancy (LLE), which was introduced by Lutz (1995). We have tried to highlight the importance of using a pure social indicator which is largely a demographically-based indicator and that intentionally does not use any economic measurement but rather combines in one number both life expectancy and literacy. In other words, Literate Life Expectancy is the aggregate average number of years that a person lives in a literate state. The Literate Life Expectancy index proved to be a very clear and simple comprehensive measure of social development at urban or rural level of spatial aggregation. Importantly, this index could be used to calculate future social development by adopting different mortality and educational scenarios, which can be associated with specific policy assumptions. To demonstrate Literate Life Expectancy’s usefulness, we assessed the levels of social development in Bangladesh at the residence levels. The obtained results at the national level shows the remarkable difference in the Literate Life Expectancy between urban and rural people (men and women). With the literacy and life expectancy information, sex differentials are seen and compared throughout each age group for both rural and urban areas, which clearly proves the existing gender difference either in rural or in urban area of Bangladesh.