The Gini concentration index for the study of survival

Here, we review some developments that have occurred mostly over the past 20 years in the use of the Gini concentration index to study survival distributions. We first describe methods to estimate the concentration index from incomplete data, both within the parametric and the nonparametric setting. We then move to illustrate work in the demographic domain, where survival distributions are typically estimated from life tables. Lastly, we consider some recent developments that have focused on the study of a class of survival distributions for which the measures of life expectancy at birth and of concentration can move in the same or opposite directions across groups (typically, birth cohorts) as a result of changes in mortality over time. For all cases we also refer to the software packages that can be used to compute the Gini index and implement the different approaches.