ABU DHABI // Women are living longer but the lifespan of men in the emirate has fallen by two years, statistics reveal.
Last year, life expectancy for Emiratis at birth was 75.2 years for men, compared with 77.1 in 2011.
Women were predicted to live marginally longer, with estimates at 78.7 years last year compared with 78.2 in 2011, new figures released by the Statistics Centre Abu Dhabi (Scad) reveal.
Life expectancy at birth indicates the number of years a newborn would live if prevailing patterns of mortality at the time of birth stayed the same throughout his life.
According to a global life-expectancy list published by the CIA World Factbook, the UAE ranked 117th in the world last year, with an average lifespan of 76.71.
Monaco had the highest life expectancy, an average of 89.68 years – five years higher than any other country. The worst life expectancy was in the African state of Chad, at 48.69 years.
Among the highest were Canada (81.48), Australia (81.90), New Zealand (80.71), Japan (83.91) and the UK (80.17).
The breakdown, by the World Factbook, confirms that women, on average, still live longer than men.
The Scad statistics show that the proportion of babies likely to survive to 65 years were 88.5 per cent for Emirati males and 92.9 per cent for Emirati females.
It also showed that Abu Dhabi’s population had leapt from 1.399 million in 2005 to 2.334m last year, an increase of 66.8 per cent.
Only a fifth of the population are UAE nationals (476,722 people), of whom 53.2 per cent (253,740) live in Abu Dhabi city, 40.7 per cent (194,158) in Al Ain and 6 per cent (28,824) in Al Gharbia.
With Emiratis a minority, the Federal National Council has set up a committee to study the structure of the population and find solutions to balance it out.
There were 1,857,841 expatriates living in the emirate last year, making up 79.9 per cent of the population, and 1,164,462 (62.7 per cent) lived in Abu Dhabi city.
Overall, men made up the majority of the population (71 per cent), due to an influx of predominantly male expatriate workers, while the most highly populated age group was 25 to 29.
Last year there were 34,103 births and 2,923 deaths in the emirate.
The birth rate was 14.6 births per 1,000 of population, while the death rate was 1.3 deaths per 1,000.
The mortality rate for infants (younger than one year old) was 6.4 deaths per 1,000 live births.
jbell@thenational.ae
