---

Life Expectancy at Birth, 2022: 83.23
Infant Mortality Rate, 2022 (per 1,000 live births): 3.30
Under-Five Mortality Rate, 2022 (per 1,000 live births): 3.91

Source: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2023). Data Portal, custom data acquired via website. United Nations: New York. Accessed 12 May 2023.

---

Life Expectancy at Birth (2019) : 82.5
Maternal Mortality Ratio (per 100,000 live births) (2017): 8
Neonatal Mortality Rate (per 1,000 live births) (2020): 3
Probability of Dying from any of Cardiovascular Disease, Cancer, Diabetes, Chronic Respiratory Diseases Between Age 30 and Exact Age 70 (%) (2019): 10.6%

Source: World health statistics 2022: monitoring health for the SDGs, sustainable development
goals. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2022. Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO.

---

Neonatal Mortality Rate (Deaths Per 1,000 Live Births) (2019): 3
Infant Mortality Rate (Deaths Per 1,000 Live Births) (2019): 4
Under-5 Mortality Rate (Deaths Per 1,000 Live Births) (2019): 4

Note: “Under-5 mortality rate – Probability of dying between birth and exactly 5 years of age, expressed per 1,000 live births.
“Infant mortality rate – Probability of dying between birth and exactly 1 year of age, expressed per 1,000 live births.
“Neonatal mortality rate – Probability of dying during the first 28 days of life, expressed per 1,000 live births.”

Source: United Nations Children’s Fund, The State of the World’s Children 2021: On My Mind – Promoting, protecting and caring for children’s mental health, UNICEF, New York, October 2021.

---

Maternal Deaths Per 100,000 Live Births, 2020: 8

---

“In 2020, life expectancy at birth in France stood at 82.3 years, almost two years higher than across the EU (Figure 1). It temporarily fell by eight months in 2020 because of deaths due to COVID-19 – the biggest reduction since 1945.

“Even before the pandemic, gains in life expectancy in France, as in many other western European countries, had slowed considerably between 2010 and 2019. While the causes for this are not fully understood, it was partly related to an increase in mortality rates from influenza, pneumonia and other respiratory diseases among older people.”

Source: OECD/European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies (2021), France: Country Health Profile 2021, State of Health in the EU, OECD Publishing, Paris/European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, Brussels.

---

“Life expectancy at birth has increased by almost five years since 1995 (Table 1.3), although it decreased by 0.5 years in women and 0.6 years in men in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. While it went up again in 2021, it did not reach its 2019 value (85.6 years for women and 79.7 for men). The French average life expectancy for women is the fifth highest in the world. Health-adjusted life expectancy was 64.6 for women and 63.7 for men in 2019 (Insee, 2021b), which is slightly higher than the EU mean (respectively 63.8 years and 63.4 years in 2018).

“Looking at causes of death, the leading causes in 2017 were cancer (28.4%), circulatory diseases (23.8%), symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings, not elsewhere classified (9.8%), respiratory diseases (7.4%) and external causes (6.5%). This makes France one of the few countries in the EU where cancer kills more people than circulatory diseases. Suicide rates are also high in France compared to the EU average (13.2 vs. 10.5 per 100,000 population) (OECD, 2020a).

“The gender gap in life expectancy in France was 6.1 years in 2020, which is higher than the EU average of 5.6 years that same year. There are also geographic and socioeconomic variations: life expectancy is lower in the five overseas departments and regions, reaching its lowest in Mayotte (72.5 years for men and 73.9 for women). There are also differences associated with income, level of education and socioeconomic status. For example, during the 2012–2016 period there was a 13-year and 8-year difference in life expectancy between the 5% richest and the 5% poorest men and women, respectively (Insee, 2018).

“The premature mortality rate was almost twice as high in men compared to women in 2021 (239 per 100,000 inhabitants vs. 122). It is higher in the overseas departments and regions. Roughly 30% of premature deaths were deemed avoidable, and avoidable mortality was 3.3 times higher in men and 5.1 times higher in the overseas departments and regions in 2013 (DREES and Santé publique France, 2017). However, it has been decreasingly steadily in the past decades, at a faster rate in men.”

Source: Or Z, Gandré C, Seppänen AV, Hernández-Quevedo C, Webb E, Michel M, Chevreul K. France: Health system review. Health Systems in Transition, 2023; 25(3): i–241.

---

---

World Health Systems Facts is a project of the Real Reporting Foundation. We provide reliable statistics and other data from authoritative sources regarding health systems in the US and sixteen other nations.

Page last updated August 11, 2023 by Doug McVay, Editor.