The Max Planck team wishes to thank all their researchers for valuable comments as well as the staff for assistance provided in recent years. We would like to thank the MPIDR founding director, Jim Vaupel, for his guidance and encouragements, the current MPIDR directors Mikko Myrskylä and Emilio Zagheni for their support, Dirk Vieregg and Peter Wilhelm for computer assistance, and our visitors for their expert assessment of our work. Thanks are also due to our library team, who helped us in tracing and ordering publications, and to our student assistants who put the original tables into electronic format.
We are especially grateful to Väinö Kannisto (†), who collected a large body of life tables and initiated the construction of this database. Our gratitude extends to Petra Vojtechovska from Poland who provided all Polish life tables, Alexander Hanika from the Austrian Statistical Office for the Austrian life tables, Francisco J. Goerlich Gisbert from the University of Valencia for the Spanish life tables, and statistical offices world-wide, which provided national tables and made it possible to construct this database.
The Berkeley team wishes to thank the faculty, staff, and students of the Department of Demography for their moral support and direct assistance with this project over the years. May we say thank you also to the Director and staff of the Berkeley Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging for their valuable support. Last, but not least, we are indebted to Felicitie Bell from the Office of the Chief Actuary, U.S. Social Security Administration, who provided the U.S. data.
The INED’s team would like to thank Ernestine Ngondji and Mokhtaria Tazi who computerized the data, Benjamin Vallin who organised the INED database, and Zakia Belogbi who gathered hard-copies of original life tables, as well as the INED library and its staff for providing access to its very rich collections.