2.4 Checking what is in the data

The life expectancy at birth data are provided by Gapminder for \(187\) countries for the years 1810 to 2016. UN forecasts for the years 2017 to 2100 are also included. Gapminder offers a separate file of countries by regions with groupings into \(4\), \(6\) or \(8\) regions. Merging the two files reveals that there are \(11\) countries in the region file with no corresponding life expectancy data. \(10\) of these are small areas (including the Holy See and Tuvalu) and one is Macedonia FYR. It turned out this is called North Macedonia in the life expectancy file and the name North Macedonia has been used. Checking for completeness of the data showed that three further small countries (Andorra, Dominica, Marshall Islands) had some life expectancy data, but not for the years 1800 to 1969 and they were excluded from most of the plots.